Couldn't tear myself from this was. So morbid and weird and amazing. All the food / kitchen / cooking references. Really got me and reminded me of the short story, They're Made Out Of Meat
I am 100% blanking on the name but I remember reading a memoir of a pathologist and it was just as morbidly fascinating as this article. I'm gonna do some digging and see if I can link it here. edit: found it . might be dated now but still worth a look if you were interested
I actually posted a different article / excerpt from that book a month or so ago! I'm kinda obsessed with this stuff lately. Actually...scratch that....I've always had a fascination with this sort of stuff. I read all Kathy Reichs books when I was 9-11 years old because I would never bring enough books on vacation and that is what my mom read. And I loved them.
neat! yeah it's cool stuff and not exactly a popular small talk conversation haha
I am like 95 percent sure no one who has ever requested an autopsy on a whim for their dead family member knew he was gonna get his ribcage split open with garden shears. Which, by the way, the fucking Atlantic misspelled.Families request autopsies for a number of reasons: They want closure; they want to see what role genetics played in someone’s death and how it might affect them in the future; they feel guilty and wonder if there’s anything they or their doctors could’ve done differently.
“What we have is a combination of surgery implements and common garden tools and kitchen appliances,” Nine says. From inside one of the cabinets he pulls out a pair of green heavy-duty hedge sheers, at least two feet long. They’re used to crack open the rib cage, sometimes in lieu of a bone saw. “We use them like chopping limbs off a tree,” he tells me.
I pictured something closer to the "Jaws of Life". I've never personally requested an autopsy, but I wouldn't be afraid to ask for one. The body is no longer the person I loved. It's just there, it has useful information inside of it - and operating rooms aren't pretty.
This reminded me of some other great articles about handling dead bodies, but told from morticians' standpoint instead of pathologists'. Confessions of a Mortician My First Mistake. In 1962, a college student answers an ad: “Mortuary Assistant required”
The dead man—“H: 71 inches,” as scrawled on the autopsy-room whiteboard—is laid out on a metal table, head propped up on a plastic block. The body is naked, marked only by a neon-yellow hospital bracelet and a paper toe tag. The flesh—now grey and exposed—is stretched tautly over bone. The feet are swollen, blackening; all the muscles are tensed, the face thrown back. It’s a wan, triangular face, with few wrinkles for a middle-aged man. The chin is dotted with stubble. Intriguingly morbid, indeed.It takes five hours to disassemble the body.