The teachings of Claudius GALENOS were regarded as the central work in the field of medicine from the author's lifetime in the second century AD right up until the late Middle Ages, when Andreas VESALIUS created a work, which was the first to actually be based on the human anatomy rather than those of the ape and the pig, and which was finally to supersede that of Galenos. The book was published in 1543 under the title "De humani corporis fabrica", and, being based on an exacting treatment of cases of violent death, it was to lay the foundations of a precise method of legal medicine. As early as 1532, the Constitutio Carolina Criminalis was created at the Regensburg Reichstag, which imposed on medical experts the duty to assess instances of illegal abortion and sterilisation, as well as cases of murder, manslaughter and assault resulting in death. They were also required to preside over the performance of post-mortem examinations on victims of violent death, and moreover to decide on the culpability of youths and the mentally ill. "Never before", wrote Otto v. OESTERLEN in1877, "was the consultation of a medical expert applied with such resoluteness and comprehensiveness as in the Procedure for the Judgment of Capital Crimes (Halsgerichtsordnung) under Charles V. ... the provisions laid down by the Constitutio Carolina served to found the field of legal medicine as a new, practical discipline in itself."

There are a whole range of definitions that serve to delineate the essence of the discipline, including those laid down by Mateo-José Bonaventura ORFILA in 1848, Carl LIMAN in 1871 and Julius KRATTER in 1921; these were similar in content, and it was Wolfgang SCHWERD who, in 1989, distilled them into a unified statement: "Legal medicine is a medical discipline in which medical knowledge and methods are applied in teaching, research, and practice to ascertain legally relevant case facts." In 1968, the German Society of Legal Medicine formally adopted its official task catalogue in Innsbruck, the wording of which was as follows: "Tasks and responsibilities of the doctor in society and for society (legal status of the doctor, contractual relationships between the doctor and the patient, medical ethics, extent and limits of the doctor's duty to maintain secrecy and give information, his duty to provide information and report matters to the authorities, legal matters concerning medical interventions, in particular operations and transfusions), teaching concerning medical malpractice, the most important medical-insurance problems and the fundamentals of medical authority activities, with particular reference to the evidential value of ascertained medical facts (concept of probability), medical activities associated with the preservation of evidence and findings in the case of questionable and legally significant physical injury, for example maltreatment and rape, and in the case of unclarified or unexpected death, problems associated with autopsies and post mortem examinations, determination of the time of death, differential diagnostic methods of distinguishing between natural death, accident, suicide, and death at the hands of another person. The need for legal certainty demands that all doctors possess knowledge of the most commonly occurring modes of impact."