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The Slow, Troubling Death of the Autopsy
Why you should get an autopsy if it’s the last thing you do
Disclaimer: The images in this story may be disturbing for some people.
For most people, the mere word “autopsy” summons up visceral images. Bodies lying cold and blue in a lab, a Y-shaped incision on their naked chest. Sardonic doctors hovering over them with medieval tools. Grim viridian-tinted light, banks of glowing screens. Bullets clinking into steel pans. There is tenebrous music, probably.
It’s nonsense.
The first thing to know about how a real autopsy lab works is that everything TV taught you is wrong. For one thing, there is no blue lighting anywhere — this is the dubious logic of CSI, in which autopsies are conducted in atmospherically dim rooms. In reality, the lighting is dazzlingly white and stark. The floors are brushed cement, the walls are white, and the tables made of stainless steel.
There are also no glowing screens, no projected holograms, no computers that can instantly spit out a list of every foreign substance in a person’s system. Instead, there are basic tools: scalpels, aging Dell computers, endless cotton towels, long-handled pruning shears that retail for $39.99 at Home Depot.
I had no idea what to expect when I was allowed to spend two weeks observing clinical autopsies at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center¹. I’d been warned that fainting was common, so as a physical coward who has not watched a horror movie since 1996, I brought a box of chewable antacids, as if that would help. When I walked into the room, swathed in blue PPE from head to toe, two naked men lay supine on two stainless-steel dissection tables. They looked like people rising suddenly from nightmares, with their chests arched and their heads thrown back and mouths agape. Except that they had been cut open from collarbone to pelvis.
This was the moment where fainting tends to happen. I reached for the antacids — and then I found I didn’t need them. Somehow, I understood. It made sense. These men were dead, and this is what we look like when we are dead.
By the end of the second day, I wasn’t just observing anymore, I was standing alongside a body, gripping its skin to hold it…
