Medicina Legal No Brasil

This article aims to highlight the importance of forensic medicine for the law. Forensic medicine is an accompanying medical and legal specialty that uses the technical-scientific knowledge of medicine to clarify the facts of interest to the judiciary, the specialist in this field receives the name of forensic doctor. Forensic pathology is often used in forensic practice because, together with the expertise of coroners, they have undeniable probative value in assisting procedural law in seeking a fair judgment based on the truth of the facts and their circumstances. A Medicina Legal é uma das especialidades médicas mais antigas. Ela nasceu, oficial e legalmente, em 1507 na Alemanha, com a promulgação do Código de Bamberg. Esse código determinava a Medicina Legal como ciência capaz de fornecer provas técnicas de natureza médica para auxiliar o Direito. A Medicina Legal serve mais ao Direito, visando defender os interesses dos homens e da sociedade, do que à Medicina. The legal name borrowed from this science indicates that, in the accomplishment of its noble mission, it also serves the legal and social sciences, with which it therefore maintains close relations. It is medicine and law that complement each other, without engalants. (c) The broader concept of health and the social role of physicians and health professionals, with important changes in the context of social reintegration and policy models; In the past, although forensic pathology was part of the curriculum of medical schools, it was limited to tanatology. Indeed, throughout history, the role of doctors has always been to provide medical care to sick or traumatized people, without assessing certain fundamental aspects of a legal nature, such as collecting traces of crimes or analyzing the consequences of cases of violence, often neglected, for example.

This failure has inadvertently deprived the right to receive evidence in the case of secondary violations arising from legal issues, be they criminal, civil, labour or otherwise. Forensic medicine has a wide application in jurisprudence, whether criminal, civil or labour, assists in the application of laws and enables the judiciary to conform to its social and constitutional master. The judiciary, from the investigation phase to the procedural sector, needs evidence that is carried out in cooperation with medical experts as accomplices of the judiciary. This complexity and the multiplicity of subjects have led to the need to consider forensic medicine as a specialty capable of training and empowering professionals to perform tasks that, in addition to very specific knowledge and technical skills, require great scientific rigour, constant updating and a great capacity for liberation and impartiality, so as not to compromise the public interest. Individual rights and therefore justice. The first signs of a close relationship between medicine and law date back to the archives of antiquity. Among ancient peoples, power was exercised by force, but it also emanated from rulers who wielded special power, a result of their alleged relationship with the gods – the priests. Since they were considered divine representatives and agents of their will, they dictated standards that had to be followed so that the good Fados could accompany the group. Thanks to the supernatural powers they claimed to possess, they were called upon to intervene frequently when the wrath of the gods, externalized in the form of illness, was defeated by the members of these communities. At that time, the priest, the interpreter of the divine will, invoked the same relationship to frighten evil spirits and heal the sick. For this, prayers were used, sacrifices offered and used through the use of medicinal herbs, which really came from the art of healing.

The herald of divine laws was at the same time legislator, judge and physician. Keywords: forensics; Importance; Right; Truth of facts. In the last century, however, major changes have been made to our society that have changed the scope of forensic medicine and other forensic sciences, particularly with regard to their social role. Among these changes, it stands out: forensic medicine includes a wide range of services at the interface between scientific practice and law, currently in the field of social medicine. Forensic science emerged to work together to solve problems that exist among members of society, making group life viable and less hectic. Forensic medicine in Brazil, aware of the inclusion of new techniques, advances in science and multiprofessional contribution, has made a small progress in the field of expertise, thanks to the performance of some public sectors in the creation, restoration and handling of laboratories, specialized institutions and the retraining of technical staff. It is believed that only with the full participation of these resources will society resist the perverse result of terrible violence that grows and torments. Nothing is fairer than to invest more and more in technical and scientific contribution and to support the judicial administration of investigative elements of transcendent value during the procedural assessment, because one of the tasks of the judge among many others is to seek the truth about the facts. In the future, all these enormous scientific and technological resources available for testing will certainly be used; such as biomolecular analysis, biochemistry of drug detection and even nuclear energy, as well as modern computers, scintigraphs and magnetic resonance tomographs as an indispensable contribution to public and socio-political interests. Forensic medicine in the experimental field in Brazil is still in its infancy and hesitant, but some lines of research are beginning to develop in university centers. In the field of education, where forensic medicine contributes more eloquently to the adaptation of positive law institutions, everything will be done on the basis of the more concrete requirements that these legal forms will make and the development of forensic thinking itself; Issues related to genetic engineering are increasingly coming to the fore, such as those of transgenic animals, human cloning and gene therapy or, in the most sensitive cases, human reproduction, which focus mainly on certain issues relating to the legal nature and fate of frozen embryos.

In pedagogical terms, Brazilian forensic medicine experienced more enlightened days, when the chairs were led by the great teachers who created around them important students and respectable schools. Today, with honourable exceptions, given the disorderly and irresponsible creation of medical and legal courses, professionals are recruited without qualifications and without intimacy with the subject. Therefore, these chairs owe much to our tradition, and if there is no well-articulated work to regain such prestige, in the future we will have forensic medicine taught according to a model far from its untenable needs. For example, many law schools already have this discipline as an option, and in others, even worse, the discipline does not exist. It is occupied by other disciplines of dubious existence and utility. Doubts remain about the quality of these future professionals in training. As far as education is concerned, it is necessary to assess the teaching activity and to provide the educational apparatus with the necessary conditions for the compulsory teaching of forensic medicine and forensic medicine, these qualified professional disciplines being always engaged before this project. They are also necessary for the establishment and expansion of specialization, master`s and doctoral programs in forensic pathology, not only to qualify teachers, but also to recruit other professions. The problem of research and research of medico-legal interest is even more complex, in which availability for the sector should be concentrated. What is interesting in this aspect is to sensitize public and private universities to the recruitment of researchers whose task would be to facilitate quality scientific production in this priority area.

The true nationalization of our forensic medicine is due to the creation of an authentic Brazilian special school in Bahia by Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, founded by, among others, Alcântara Machado, Júlio Afrânio Peixoto, Leonídio Ribeiro, Oscar Freire and Estácio Luiz Valente de Lima, who originally “directed the differentiation of the discipline, its methods and doctrine for the peculiarities of justice. the physical, biological and psychological conditions of the environment” (Geraldo Vasconcelos). And since then, forensic schools have been sadiamented, with lawyers, lawyers, police delegates, doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists who are healthy, as the degree of connection it has with all branches of knowledge.