Autopsy

An autopsy of a dead person is performed in order to find out what post-mortem changes have occurred in the body and what is the cause of the death of this person. Usually, the autopsy is of two types: forensic and pathoanatomical.

Pathoanatomical autopsy is performed in those people who died in hospital facilities from serious illnesses. That is, the cause of death is most likely to be expected, based on data on the course of the disease, so this death is natural. The forensic autopsy is done by order of the relevant authorities, for example the police, in order to establish the following important facts that can establish whether the death was natural or violent. In this type of autopsy, forensic doctors can establish:

• the cause and time of death;

• the presence of additional bodily injuries that did not result in death, but which are aggravating in the proceedings;

• whether some damage was caused during the life of the deceased, or it was done after the death of a person;

• prescription and sequence of transformations in the body;

• the way of causing harm and the mechanism of action;

• establishing the most probable cause of death.

Typically, such studies are conducted for people who have been forcibly killed and who died suddenly. A forensic autopsy can also be done when relatives complain of wrong treatment of the patient, from which supposedly there was a death. Regardless of all the causes and circumstances, corpses of persons without a definite place of residence are opened, an autopsy is carried out and the corpses are inspected, which are dismembered. The autopsy is performed by special medical personnel - forensic medical experts, who can provide qualified assistance, especially when dealing with police authorities. If there are no such doctors (for example, it is impossible to transport a corpse to a morgue), then any doctor can perform an autopsy.

An autopsy involves several stages. The first stage is a visual examination of the body that came to the examination. Doctors examine the corpse, clothes in detail, establish the integrity of clothing, the presence of other objects on it or on the body. Further, the corpse in the morgue is undressed and proceed to examine the skin and the body as a whole. Determine if there is damage to the body and if so, where they are. Describe the location and nature of cadaveric spots, which indicates the prescription of the onset of death. Next, soft tissues and internal organs are examined. In the forensic autopsy, corpses are not washed, so as not to lose important clues. If there is a suspicion of the nature of death, a forensic expert may prescribe additional tests to determine the cause of death more accurately. Special work is the autopsy of the child's corpse. It is important for the doctor to determine whether the child was born at birth, was he alive, or died in the womb, how mature his organs, how much he lived after the moment of birth, whether there were attempts at caring for the child. Usually viable, live-born babies are considered to be those children whose weight is more than one and a half kilograms, they have a body length of about forty centimeters, in their organs there are no pathologies of intrauterine development that could lead to death. In addition, samples of the lungs and stomach are taken - if parts of these organs float on the water, then the child was born alive and breathing. The autopsy of the child's corpse is especially important, since when the mother is brought to justice, she will be sentenced on the basis of this particular procedure. The entire course of the autopsy is described in detail in a special form, there is also a graph of the final conclusion and the establishment of the causes of death. After the opening, the relevant papers are issued to the relatives of the deceased.