Forensic Pathology and the History of Death Investigation

Creepy, Occult, and Otherworldly Episode #1 of 4. Get a complete transcript and sources for this episode at digpodcast.org. Instagram accounts like @Mrs_Angemi and @CrimeSceneCleanersInc boast hundreds of thousands of followers, all hoping to catch a glimpse of morbid pathology and the biohazardous remnants of foul play. This is obviously not a niche thing. We are just as much fascinated by violent death as we are scared by it. There is something about violence and death that is captivating to us. When violent death is combined with high-tech gadgets, police procedures, and super cool forensic testing, you get true crime, one of the most popular genres worldwide. Marissa is a true crime junkie. But she's also a social historian of medicine and the body, so today’s episode is a combination of her most favorite things. This episode weaves together three largely unrelated narratives: medical pathology has its own history; death investigation does too; and to make things more complicated, there’s a whole medico-legal infrastructure whose history we have to tell.

Select Sources:

Jentzen, Jeffrey M. Death Investigation in America Coroners, Medical Examiners, and the Pursuit of Medical Certainty. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Hanzlick, Randy, and Debra Combs. 1998. “Medical Examiner and Coroner Systems: History and Trends”. JAMA. 279, no. 11: 870-874.

Simmons, John G. Doctors and Discoveries: Lives That Created Today’s Medicine. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

Kevin Siena, "Searchers of the Dead"in Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 123.

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