Law and Medicine

Abstract

The goal of legal education is to get the student to ‘think like a lawyer.’ The goal of medicolegal courses in medical schools, on the other hand, has often seemed to be to get the medical student to think bad things about lawyers. While the total solution to the legendary distrust between these two professions may not be an understanding of methodology, I suggest here that one way to increase cooperation between the professions is to teach law in medical schools in a way that emphasizes methods of approaching problems and which seeks to dispel the major myths that many, if not most, doctors have about the law. I include a description of the course in legal medicine which presently forms part of the curriculum at Boston University Medical School.