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Chapter 1 Procedural Immunity: Medical Knowledge in the Age of Legal Certainty
- Central European University Press
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Chapter 1 Procedural Immunity: Medical Knowledge in the Age of Legal Certainty To understand how and why physicians responded to the judicial reform as they did, it is necessary to first examine the expectations and relationships that they brought with them into the reform period from their pre-reform experience. This experience, as I seek to demonstrate in this chapter, was shaped by the physician’s rulebound work and status under the inquisitorial system. The historical literature, with few exceptions, has often conveyed the impression that the legal personnel who staffed the new courts were the product of the judicial reform.1 With regard to medical personnel, it was precisely those physicians who received their education and initial experience under Nicholas I who responded most vociferously to the tensions produced by the implementation of the reform. This “crossover” generation of physicians, who engaged in forensic medical activity across the divide of the judicial reform, set the tone for the broader public debates and polemics over expert status that the reform’s implementation ignited.2 In this chapter, I examine the status of the physician under the pre-reform rules of procedure. In doing so, I argue that the physician ’s elevated and insulated procedural status under the inquisitorial system shaped physicians’ perception of their social role and, included in that, a sense of shared occupational purpose with jurists. To this end, I contend that the physician’s procedural status served as the basis for extending this privileged status to the broader institutional level, shaping physicians’ sense of centrality and authority in the administration of justice and fostering a particular relationship with their legal counterparts. All of these elements were central to physicians’ response to the 1864 judicial reform (the subject of later chapters). Finally, I suggest that this procedural situation contributed to physicians’ sense of their social identity coming into the reform period. In this respect, this legal setting and work experience contributed to the formation of physicians’ broader status, beyond and in addition to factors such as low social origins, therapeutic efficacy, or state control, which historians have traditionally relied on to define the occupation and situate it on the social landscape, relative to other occupational groups and the state.3 In addressing these issues, this chapter analyzes the conjunction between the two bodies of law governing judicial and medical practice, and the institutional and social implications of this conjunction. To this end, I consider the ways in which the rules governing judicial and medical practice were interlocking and operated as a single regulatory system as part of the state’s broader objective of administering social order—rather than fostering separate, distinct, and isolated occupational spheres, as historians of imperial Russia traditionally depict them.4 Finally, I consider the implications of this interconnection at a social level in terms of the relationship between physicians and legal administrators who served the courts. The first part of this chapter examines the legal-structural dimensions that shaped the physician’s procedural status. This section identifies three main characteristics of the pre-reform system which, I argue, bore directly on the developments discussed above. The first characteristic is the linkage between the bodies of legislation that regulated medicine and law, and by extension, the interconnection between the medical and legal administrative spheres as part of—what was intended to be—a single rational system . The second characteristic is the reproduction and reinforcement of this “joint enterprise” between medicine and law at the level of procedure, again, organized according to an ethos of rationality . The final characteristic is the privileged status of medical Medicine, Law, and the State in Imperial Russia 16 [3.95.39.127] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:41 GMT) Procedural Immunity knowledge that resulted from these legislative and procedural arrangements and the rational quest for legal certainty. The second part of this chapter considers the broader institutional and social implications of this procedural status. The Bodies of Law Historians of imperial Russia have up to now considered the bodies of law that regulated jurists and physicians in isolation from one another. Indeed this is reasonable and consistent with the questions that historians have asked of these sources. Historians of Russian law have considered the 1716 Military Statute only in relation to the legal system it established; historians of medicine have likewise looked at medical regulations in isolation and, among Western historians in particular, from the perspective of how these rules constrained the professional development of physicians...