Medical Law and Health Care

Abstract

The notion of “medical law” is the same for all European jurists: it amounts to the body of legal rules which relate to medical activity and to relations between people connected with that activity. It is another thing whether these rules, in terms of legislation and legal theory, are unified into a system representing a closed, logical entity. Medical law in Yugoslavia has no such status, since it is dispersed among many branches of law: criminal, civil, administrative, labour, social and international. In addition, it does not show its own individuality within the framework of these branches. Living “under an alien roof it has not succeeded in creating its own principles or being accepted in the thinking of jurists as an entity in itself. The great majority of Yugoslav jurists have not even heard of the notion of “medical law”, let alone conceived of it as the expression for a separate legal discipline. Members of the legal profession are not even able to get any insight in university text books, and this also applies to the remainder of professional literature intended for the wider circle of readers. Only outstanding Yugoslavian jurists are aware at present of medical law as a tentative, separate scientific discipline, due to their interest in foreign legal periodicals and literature. Following some foreign examples, they have tried to establish a Yugoslavian association for medical law, but have had no success. Several joint professional symposia attended by jurists and physicians have taken place where certain problems of joint interest for legal and medical science have been treated, but after these symposia each profession has returned to “its own business”, so that interdisciplinary cooperation between them has not taken deeper root.