Medical power and the legal status of the dislocated human body: medical trials

Abstract

The 20^th century was marked by some great medical trials and, although the Nuremberg trial comes first for dramatisation, the importance of the stakes has kept growing: cases at the end of the century which got less media attention, some of which are not yet over, jeopardise, even more than the abominations of Nazi science, the foundations of our civilisation. To show how we reached this point, an itinerary has to be perceived which, from the Middle Ages to our times, shows the rise in medical power until the point where Western society, realising with horror the possibility of a cataclysm for civilisation, tried to overcome its anxiety by becoming inexhaustible on the subject of bioethics which signified everything but meant nothing. We can consider that the medical trials of the 20^th century have kept raising the question of the definition of a human being, and this (the judges and doctors perhaps do not have a very clear view of this) is because, at the turn of the 5^th and 6^th century, the legal artefact of the person was used by theological thinking, then by modern philosophical language, to designate the human being. This confirmation of the presence of civil law at the heart of civilisation reminds us that the history of law is something other than an erudite leisure activity.