Free Morgue by Dr. Vincent DiMaio Page A

a doctor and she was finding herself, but we had each other, and we made a good team.
    We still do.
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    Doctors have been solving crimes for a long time, even if medicine had no name for them until the mid-twentieth century.
    Two thousand years ago, in 44 BC , Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by Roman senators in history’s highest profile murder. A doctor named Antistius was summoned to examine the emperor’s corpse. He reported that Caesar had been stabbed twenty-three times in the face, belly, groin, and arms, but only one wound—an upward thrust under his left shoulder blade that probably pierced his heart—had been fatal. The attack was so frenzied that many of the would-be assassins were cut, too. Antistius believed that if Caesar had not died from a sliced heart, he would have bled out in a few minutes as he lay unattended on the Senate floor at the foot of Pompey’s statue.
    It was history’s first recorded autopsy.
    A thousand years later in medieval England, the king appointed local cronies without any medical training to represent his financial interest in all criminal cases (as well as hear confessions, investigate shipwrecks, pardon criminals, and confiscate royal fishes). Also among these clerks’ duties was to inspect the corpses in all unnatural deaths and record their observations in an “inquest.” The appointee’s duty to “keep the pleas of the crown”—in Latin, custos placitorum coronae —naturally led to his title as “crowner” or “coroner.”
    Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo dissected corpses to improve their art, but they also became fascinated by the irregularities they saw. Pope Clement VI ordered that corpses of plague victims be opened to see what was inside.
    By the 1600s, the Age of Enlightenment, scientific advances and a fresh social conscience breathed new life into death and crime investigations. And in the late 1800s, fingerprinting revolutionized forensics.
    In 1890, Baltimore gave two doctors the title of medical examiner and assigned them to perform all autopsies ordered by the county coroner. Many big American cities followed suit and eventually gave the responsibility for all death investigations to physicians, although our system of elected coroners, who often have no medical training at all, remains firmly entrenched in America today.
    The first true medical examiner system was established in New York City in 1918 when the city abandoned its coroner system.
    So we have two types of medicolegal systems in America: the coroner and the medical examiner. The coroner system, which dates back to tenth-century England, still prevails in about 40 percent of America’s 3,144 counties, with 2,366 offices. In those places, the coroner is virtually always elected and almost never a physician. Even when the elected coroner is a doctor, he (or she) is not usually a forensic pathologist.
    The job requirements? Oh, have a local address, not be a felon, be at least eighteen years old. That’s about it. But that’s no problem. Once elected, the car-salesman-turned-coroner magically acquires the necessary medical and forensic knowledge he needs to solve extraordinarily complicated deaths. And that leaves time for the most important job any politician has: getting reelected.
    Elected coroners are often small-town morticians or cemetery workers whose daily contact with death makes it easy for voters to assume (incorrectly) that they are perfectly suited to the grim tasks of autopsies, blood work, body handling, and the occasional exhumation. Later in this book, I will tell a story about a backwater undertaker who boasted that his primary qualification to be the coroner was that he was the only guy in town who had a car big enough to properly haul a dead body.
    Most coroner systems produce poor, inconsistent work; most medical examiners good, consistent work. In a 2009 book entitled