While the law has developed greater protection for the growing competence of adolescents, they have not been recognised as autonomous in the same way as adults. This difference in treatment is especially clear in medical decision-making. The law has been willing to accord young people the right to consent to treatment in their best interests, but has been far more reluctant to accept full adolescent autonomy, including the right to refuse such treatment. This chapter considers the assessment of young people’s competence to make decisions concerning their medical treatment. It then considers the authority of parents and courts to overrule adolescents’ decisions to refuse treatment. There are strong reasons to argue that parents should no longer have such authority, which is increasingly out of step with medical practice and developments in children’s rights. The jurisdiction of the courts to do so is well-established but will only provide an adequate safeguard if sufficient weight is placed on young people’s rights to bodily integrity and decision-making. The chapter concludes by considering the application of these principles in the context of adolescent’s use of contraception and abortion.

This chapter considers the role of rights in decisions concerning the health of children who are not yet competent to consent to their own medical treatment. The medical treatment of children is particularly contentious in cases involving disagreement between parents and medical professionals over the provision of life-sustaining treatment. These fraught disputes have often become a site of disagreement over the extent of parental freedom and state intervention in determining children’s best interests. Despite the obvious implications for the child’s own rights to life and bodily integrity, those rights rarely play an overt role in such decisions. A further area of contention is in the extent of parental discretion to consent to non-therapeutic intervention, such as tissue donation or circumcision. These decisions are again treated primarily as a matter of parental discretion; in practice, again the law is content to tolerate significant intervention without adequate protection for the child’s own rights.

The fourth chapter examines how German military doctors attempted to treat the injuries caused by poison gas. World War I medical professionals often downplayed reports of gassing by claiming that the affected men had predispositions to pulmonary illness or constitutional weakness. Furthermore, many physicians and psychologists saw what was then termed “gas-neurosis,” or psychological discomfort stemming from poison gas exposure, as an affront to both their concept of German masculinity and national health. Due to both this cultural commitment and a lack of knowledge regarding poison gas exposure, doctors tended to dismiss gas symptoms such as chronic coughing, dizziness, lung inflammation, insomnia, and hallucinations that could develop years after initial exposure. Much like the scientists who had developed poison gas at Fritz Haber’s Institute, most German physicians continued to view the weapon as something that could be controlled and treated with the proper application of scientific and medical knowledge.

This chapter discusses the right to health as it is protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, other Council of Europe instruments, in EU law and in international instruments. Attention is paid to eg access to health care, quality of health care, positive obligations and informed consent. In the final section, a short comparison between the different instruments is made.

This chapter introduces the book by providing some background and context to the medico-legal nexus for treatment of trans youth with gender dysphoria in Australia, England and Wales. The guiding research questions for the book are outlined, followed by the structure of chapters. The chapter descriptions are interwoven with the relevant methods employed to examine the law in the relevant jurisdictions. Lastly, the scope and limitations of the book are noted to guide future researchers in this area.

This chapter presents an overview of the medical literature to outline what is known about gender dysphoria in childhood and adolescence. This chapter begins with a discussion of terminology commonly used in literature on gender diversity, as well as the preferred terms within this book. Second, literature on the medicalisation of gender diversity is reviewed to contextualise the relationship between gender and the medical establishment. Third, the diagnoses that may be given to trans children and adolescents that present to a medical professional for treatment are reviewed alongside critical commentary. Fourth, the research on gender variance in children and adolescents is reviewed broadly. Key themes identified in the literature include: prevalence; determinants of gender diversity; the natural history of gender dysphoria; and co-occurring conditions of trans youth. This area of research has advanced significantly in recent years. However, it is also in constant flux and answers to key questions are unsettled. This review of the medical literature provides context for treatment recommendations for children and adolescents discussed in Chapter 3.

This chapter discusses the growth of military systems in Western Europe during the period from 1460 to 1560, the preliminary stage of what has often, controversially, been called the ‘military revolution’. The main characteristics of military violence generated by dynastic wars were the inexorable growth of armies and the problems of pay and supply which accompanied this. Military technology affected both the nature and duration of wars: artillery came to dominate both in siege warfare, naval warfare and on the open battlefield. The lives of professional soldiers were drastically affected by new forms of trauma and medical treatment remained rudimentary. At the same time, the relations between soldiery and civilians continued to be conflictual, especially in war zones. Endemic violence accompanied any war. The features specific to this period combine a more intensive kind of violence brought about by changes in military technology and the scale of war with a broadly dysfunctional control system. This meant that the larger armies and more destructive campaign had an impact of casualties and losses among the soldiery as well as a chaotic impact on the ‘civilian’ population, though the patterns of ‘collateral’ violence remained much the same as they had been for centuries.