Limited Forensic Assessability of Soft Tissue Injuries. Contrastive Terminological Analyses of Hungarian, Austrian and German Medical Diagnostic Reports

Abstract

The results of the present study confirm the hypothesis that MDRIs can be characterised by interdiscursivity, predominantly due to the inconsistent use of terms and the absence of important features of soft tissue injuries in the three analysed countries. These factors can be attributed to the supposition that clinicians do not always seem to be aware of the fact that their medical findings might be used as legal evidence when a crime or forbearance is investigated. Another reason might be that they only concentrate on the acute treatment, which they often have to perform at night or under aggravated circumstances. There are neither standardised forms to fill in nor terms made available for physicians formulating findings on injuries. Consequently, it can hardly be expected that primary treating doctors should provide MDRIs which are perfectly applicable to forensic reconstruction.