Creating a forensic examination in Russia: military regulations (1716)

One of the legal innovations of the reign of Peter the Great is the creation of forensic medicine in the form of legislative regulation of the anatomy of a dead body before burial to establish the cause of death. The final conclusion is made that this document is a monument of law. The task of a retrospective review of the complex of causes and conditions that led to the establishment of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the beginning of the XVIII century in Russia has been solved. The method of formal legal analysis of the first Russian legislative act on forensic medical examination was used. It is concluded that this monument of law has a general cultural significance, as a result of a long tradition of the development of medicine and law in Russia. The legal norms related to the establishment of the institute of forensic medical examination in the Russian state, contained in the texts of the monuments of the law of the feudal period: The Contract (“Pravda”), were used as research materials Smolensk with Riga and the Gothic coast, the Charter of Tsar Boris Fedorovich to the Patriarchal Throne, a hundred and a number of normative legal acts of the era of Peter I, including the Military Charter. It is established that the Russian society of the beginning of the XVIII century was objectively ready to create a forensic medical examination in the form of an institute of examination and autopsy of a dead body to find out the causes of death. The conditions in which the monument of law was created were revealed. It is concluded that Peter’s reforms were in many ways ahead of their time, as a result of which a legislative act was created that reflected the advanced trends in the development of law.