Selected Aspects of the Legal Regulations of Epidemics in the Czech Lands in the Period from the Nineteenth Century to the Year 1948
Abstract
The study deals with selected issues of the development of the legal regulation of the health police in relation to the regulation of contagious diseases, especially the regulation of preventive and repressive measures against the spread of contagious diseases in the selected time period, but it also touches in part on the roots of this regulation in the Enlightenment period or the concepts of health reforms, including vaccination as a prevention against this spread.
So far, published works on related topics have focused mainly on the medical background of problems related to the suppression of the spread of infectious diseases, on social or institutional-administrative aspects, mainly up to the first half of the 19th century, providing a generally historical or medical perspective, while the legal side of the matter has remained rather in the background.
The aim of the study is therefore to conduct a discursive analysis and also to shed more light on the legal situation on the basis of publications, articles and essays on the subject and legal regulations and to point out possible parallels with current legislation. This inquiry into the current legislation is not done by comparing it to specific legal acts, whether generally binding or individual, of the current law, but rather by pointing out some aspects of the problem, emphasizing the fact that the situation that has arisen in connection with the Covid-19 pandemic is not, in many elements, as surprisingly new as it may have appeared and been presented so far, without examining the historical context.