Thurgood Marshall, Hero of American Medicine.

One of the heroes in American history, Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) sought legal remedies against racial discrimination in education and health care. As director of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) of NAACP from 1940 to 1961, his success in integrating law schools in Texas led to the first black medical student admitted to a state medical school in the South. Representing doctors and dentists needing a facility to perform surgery, the LDF brought cases before the courts in North Carolina that moved the country toward justice in health care. His ultimate legal victory came in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the decision that declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. In 1964, the LDF under Jack Greenberg, Marshall's successor as director, won Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital, a decision that held that hospitals accepting federal funds had to admit black patients. The two decisions laid the judicial foundation for the laws and administrative acts that changed America's racial history, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Social Security Act Amendments of 1965 that established Medicare and Medicaid. His achievements came during the hottest period of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Well past the middle of the twentieth century, black Americans were denied access to the full resources of American medicine, locked in a "separate-but-equal" system woefully inadequate in every respect. In abolishing segregation, Marshall initiated the long overdue remedy of the unjust legacies of slavery and Jim Crow.

Tracing the Boundaries of the Natural: Medicine and the Inquiry on Miracles in Early Modern Canonization Trials.

Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the inquiry on miracles in the canonization process reveals a fundamental cooperation between medicine and religion. During the last stage of the trials, theologians, lawyers, and physicians concurred with refined reports to accomplish full analysis of the alleged miracles. The promoter of the faith had the task of doubting the supposed miracle healing on juridical, medical and theological grounds; the lawyer supporting the cause responded to any inconsistency in witnesses' depositions; the physician had the task of finding any natural causes which could lead to a natural recovery of the subject. The interplay of these tripartite disciplines underlies early modern probation of supposed miracles. In this paper I will examine the institutional and cultural consequences of the demand for evidence in canonization trials: on the one hand, the increasing role of medical experts in the assessment of miracles and the friction between them and the other members of the committee; on the other hand, the rise of a new method of inquiry in the legal arena.

The "Good Old Days" of Courtroom Questioning: Changes in the Format of Child Cross-Examination Questions Over 60 Years.

Recent decades have seen an explosion of research into children's eyewitness capabilities and resulted in legal reform to render the adversarial trial process more child friendly. Many, however, have been left with the feeling that the most intimidating legal process for child complainants-cross-examination-has not changed meaningfully despite its potential to distort children's evidence. To test this possibility, we compared the cross-examination questioning of Australian child sexual abuse complainants in the 1950s to that used in contemporary cases. We found that the format of cross-examination questions has remained largely consistent over time, with leading questions still making up the bulk of the questions asked. The changes that we did observe, however, are concerning. Cross-examination questions posed to contemporary child complainants were less likely to be open-ended and more likely to be complex, relative to those asked in the 1950s. Crucially, contemporary complainants were asked 3 times as many cross-examination questions as they were 60 years ago. These changes are likely to have detrimental effects on child complainants and their evidence and could reduce the ability of jurors to reach just outcomes in these cases.

A historical comparison of Australian lawyers' strategies for cross-examining child sexual abuse complainants.

Many child sexual abuse complainants find the adversarial trial process so distressing that they say they would never report abuse again. Their concerns stem largely from cross-examination, in which the lawyer acting for the accused attempts to discredit their evidence. We examined whether-and if so, how-Australian defense lawyers' approaches to cross-examining child sexual abuse complainants have changed meaningfully over the past 60 years. To do this, we systematically evaluated cases that were prosecuted in the 1950s, comparing them to a matched set of cases from the turn of the twenty-first century. Despite the intervening law reforms designed to improve complainants' experience in court, we found that, relative to their historical counterparts, contemporary child complainants of sexual abuse are actually subjected to far lengthier cross-examinations involving a much broader range of strategies and associated tactics. These findings have important implications for future legal practice and reform, and for the way in which these are evaluated.

Dr Eugenia Rose Aylmer Cooper (1898-1991): Manchester's renowned female anatomist and neurohistologist.

Having excelled in histology, Dr Eugenia Cooper, following graduation in medicine in Manchester, embarked on a career spanning 44 years in anatomy and histology at Manchester University. Her inimitable character was readily remembered by those she had taught. She was the first female graduate to gain an MD with gold medal for her thesis on the histology of the endocrine organs. However, her main study was the development of the human brainstem from the early weeks of gestation, which remains the basis for anatomical understanding today. More controversial was her theory on circulation and absorption of the cerebrospinal fluid. On retiring as Reader in Histology, she expressed disappointment at not being appointed a professor, which she considered was due to her gender. Possibly to compensate for this, she had studied law as an additional interest. She continued in research for a further 10 years in reproductive pharmacology. After retirement she donated her medals to the University, three to be awarded in medicine and histology, which have now lapsed, but the medals in computer science and music continue to be important rewards.

[A campaign against the law of 1838 governing the status of the mentally ill. Hector Malot, Léopold Turck, Théophile Huc -- a writer, a doctor, a lawyer]. / Une campagne contre la loi de 1838 régissant le statut des aliénés. Hector Malot, Léopold Turck, Théophile Huc, un romancier, un médecin, un juriste.

When Napoleon the 3d's government turned to its liberal phase, dissatisfactions felt free to become visible, among which the problems engendered by the law of 1838 about the situation of mental patients; during the 60s, a novelist, Hector Malot; a doctor, Léopold Turck; a jurist, Théophile Huc, tried to amend it.

Chemo killed the small-talk gene.

Urvashi Vaid is a community organizer and writer active in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and social justice movements for over three decades. She is currently Director of the Engaging Tradition Project at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia University Law School. She is founder of LPAC, the first lesbian political action committee, and sits on the Board of Directors of the Gill Foundation. Vaid's past positions include Executive Director of the Arcus Foundation, Deputy Director of Governance and Civil Society Unit for the Ford Foundation, Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and staff attorney for the ACLU National Prison Project. She is author of the books Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and The Assumptions of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Politics, and Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation, and co-editor of the book Creating Change: Public Policy, Sexuality and Civil Rights. Urvashi has had thyroid cancer and stage III breast cancer.

Healthy barbs: activism confronts mortality.

Barbara Brenner, JD, was the Executive Director of Breast Cancer Action (BCA) from 1995-2010. Before that, she was a longtime activist in the anti-war movement and an attorney who, for most of her career, practiced public policy law. After she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993 at the age of 41, she took the helm of BCA. Under her leadership, the organization moved into a position of national advocacy-demanding research on the causes and prevention of breast cancer, including the role of industrial pollutants. Barbara started the "Think Before You Pink" campaign, encouraging people to question whether companies that display pink ribbons actually produce products that harm women's health or generate any funds to fight breast cancer. Her blog, "Healthy Barbs," challenged readers to critique routine healthcare practices and policies. Barbara received numerous awards, including a Jefferson Award for Public Service in 2007, the Smith College Medal in 2012, and the ACLU-Northern California's Lola Hanzel Courageous Advocacy Award in 2012. Barbara had a recurrence of breast cancer in 1996. She died of complications associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, on May 10, 2013.

Teaching psychology to jurists: initiatives and reactions prior to World War I.

This article deals with the kind of psychology suggested for jurists that was thought to be necessary training for their work. An analysis of the content of two textbooks by Otto Lipmann and Karl Marbe reveals that such teaching activity involves two different levels of historical analysis. On the one hand, it relates to experimental research done by psychologists on law-related issues; on the other, it concerns the professional experience psychologists accumulated by acting as expert witnesses in court. The paper investigates how psychologists presented psychology to jurists, which methods and theories they suggested as being essential for juristic training and professional performance, and whether jurists appreciated these materials and efforts. These inquiries are embedded in the debate on the history of criminal psychology, taking into account the European, particularly the German, context. The author shows how specific historical developments led to an increased exchange between experimental psychology and criminal law during the first decades of the 20th century.