Book Description:
This is a collection of essays which is focused towards showing that the experience of health is shaped by law and medical regulation and that health is part of 'our' shared subjectivities. We try to show that law and legal concepts have a powerful role to play in regulation, while at times being indistinguishable from other practices of regulation offered by accountants, economists and medical scientists. To that end, the collection opens with two essays on the relationship between ethics and law, one centered on the concept of the tragic body in Kantian autonomy and one centred on the Lockian conception of ownership of the body as a self referential property right. The issue of health is then explored along with issues of sexuality isn three essays, each offering a comparative analysis, on the regulation of embryo and infertility research in the United Kingdom and Denmark, the treatment of HIV positive prisoners in the United Kingdom and United States, and the regulation of non consensual sterilization in the United Kingdom and Germany. Individual evaluation of health and well being is compared to the assessment of pain and suffering under negligence law in an essay which explains the value of subjective quality of life questionnaires. The involvement of general principles of law in supporting entrenched hierarchies within the medical profession is illustrated by an essay on the ascription of legal responsibility between doctors and nurses. The issue of responsibility is further explored in an essay on accountability and questions of the economics of health and competition are dealt with in an essay on medical audit.
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