Abstract
The medico-legal problems surrounding head injury cases are as follows : The pattern or scene of the receiving wound is reproduced, and information (material) to elucidate the whereabouts of the responsibility of victim's injury is offered. In other words, the medico-legal problem is in the elucidation of the legal causal relation. Information included here are not only the kind of the wound but also the apparatus which caused the wound, the type of impact, the mechanism of injury (blow, fall and fall down), the body situation when the wound was received (drinking, drug-intake and disease, etc.), and the state until dying after receiving the wound (level of consciousness and action ability). In fatal cases, elucidation of the cause of death is requested. In the mechanism of head injury, coup contusions are more easily caused than contre-coup contusions in blows and contre-coup contusions are more easily caused than coup contusions in falls and falling down. The apparatus which caused the wound can be judged according to the kind of wound surface. The level of drinking when wounded can be analyzed from not only blood and urine but also the intracranial hematoma. It is needless to say that the diagnosis of "Wound which can become cause of death" is the most important in the death example.
