This updated volume on clinical forensic medicine covers the topics required for forensic healthcare professionals working in general forensic medicine and sexual offence medicine. All chapters have been reviewed and revised to reflect how the provision of forensic medical services has changed since the previous edition with multidisciplinary teams working in the custodial environment, comprising doctors, nurses, and paramedics and those practitioners providing sexual offence examinations.


New and updated topics include: the increasing importance of photo documentation by health care professionals; updated information on strangulation, torture; a review of bite mark injuries; the explosion of Novel Psychoactive Substances worldwide; the changing patterns of deaths in custody and deaths following police contact; and the introduction in various jurisdictions of legal limits for drugs based on zero tolerance or a risk based approach.


Written by a team of experts, the new edition of this book is a valuable resource for forensic healthcare professionals including doctors, nurses and paramedics working in general forensic medicine and sexual offence medicine, as well as emergency physicians, pediatricians and gynaecologists.


Margaret Stark has been working in the field of forensic and legal medicine for 30 years. She is the President of the Faculty of Forensic & Legal Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians of London and Chair of the Forensic Science Sub-Committee of the Faculty, Lead Facilitator for the Faculty's course in General Forensic Medicine and an educational advisor for the Faculty's examinations. She currently works with the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), and with Sussex Police.


She is the Responsible Officer and Appraisal Lead for Care & Custody Health (Ltd). She worked in Sydney, Australia, for over three years as Director of the Clinical Forensic Medicine Unit for NSW Police and was appointed as an Adjunct Professor at Sydney University. She has a breadth of experience in all aspects of forensic and legal medicine in both the UK and Australia and has been directly involved in the establishment of Faculties in both countries. She was the Founding Academic Dean for the FFLM and was awarded the David Jenkins Professorship in Forensic and Legal Medicine 2011/12. She has written extensively in the field of clinical forensic medicine and has also been involved in a number of collaborative quantitative and qualitative research projects, including the evidence base for forensic sampling, and the UK Government research into cannabis and driving.