JORGE RODRIGUES SIMAO

Health Law: The Basics

Before birth

Despite its invasion by ultrasound and, sometimes, more dangerous tools, the uterus is a secret place. What happens there is biologically mysterious. The effects of gestation can be described in a fairly crude anatomical way. So too can a few of their more superficial causes. But the nature of the process and the detailed blueprint of the engine that drives it remain baffling.

The law has been content to leave metaphysics out of its own intrauterine fumblings. It has refused to be drawn into philosophical debate about the status of the early embryo, preferring to navigate the shadow lands of the unborn using its familiar instruments of rights and duties. It uses them with a fitting, deferential caution.

The History of Economic Thought (Economic Ideas and Thinkers)

Fifty years ago, the question was ‘why did the Industrial Revolution happen in England rather than France?’ Research on China, India, and the Middle East has emphasized the inherent dynamism of the world’s great civilizations, so today we must ask why economic growth took off in Europe rather than Asia or Africa. Data on incomes in the distant past are not robust, but it looks as though the differences in prosperity between countries in 1500 were small. The present division between rich and poor largely emerged since Vasco da Gama sailed to India and Columbus discovered the Americas.

Uncertain Future

@jorgersimao

350 Years of Economic Theory in 50 Minutes

Macroeconomic history

I said one of the things we need to do if we are to understand Becky’s and Desta’s lives is to uncover the pathways by which their families came to inherit their current circumstances. This is the stuff of economic history. In studying history, we could, should we feel bold, take the long view - from about the time agriculture came to be settled practice in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent (roughly, southeast Turkey today) some 11,000 years ago – and try to explain why the many innovations and practices that have cumulatively contributed to the making of Becky’s world either didn’t reach or didn’t take hold in Desta’s part of the world.

Medical Law - WHO

Health Law - WHO

Legal Medicine and Medical Law

Health Law - Wikipedia

Medical Law - Wikipedia

Origins and legacies

 An orthopaedic surgeon might have the same skills as a carpenter, but bone and muscle were and are regarded as being made of stuff importantly, if mysteriously, different from pine and plywood. Bone and flesh build boxes for souls. Mess with the boxes and you could affect the soul. That gives physicians and surgeons awesome, high-priestly power.

The accountability of medicine’s high priests Priests are a set-apart caste: they are expected to behave better than the hoi polloi. All priests serve in temples. Those in the temples dedicated to divinities are answerable to the divinities; and those (the doctors) who serve in the material temples of the human soul (by rummaging around inside chests or by putting leeches on limb stumps) are answerable to the body owners, or to the society that represents them. But there is a problem about such accountability. If you’re an inaccessibly high priest-if your work is beyond the ken of the people to whom you’re accountable-how can accountability be real?