Carla Valentine - The Chick and the Dead - Life and Death Behind Mortuary Doors

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First published in Great Britain under the title Past Mortems by Sphere, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, an Hachette UK company

First U.S. Edition: June 2017

eISBN: 9781250120694

First eBook Edition: June 2017

If you haven’t seen My Girl I highly recommend it, not only because it’s wonderful but also because otherwise that last sentence will make no sense.

Things weren’t actually dirty on one side and not on the other, they’re just relative terms we use for ‘places where autopsies happen’ and places where they don’t. We also have ‘clean’ areas which never have any contact with the deceased, such as the office or break room. Those areas, in the ‘traffic light system’, are described as ‘green’.

He is on TV now, in a popular programme called Autopsy , which examines the recent deaths of famous people. Brittany Murphy and Whitney Houston have been featured.

I’m not sure why there’s such haughtiness about it. I meet people all the time who say ‘I’m a nurse’ not an ‘SRN’ (state registered nurse) or ‘I’m a doctor’ not an ‘SpR’ (specialist registrar). It’s just more conversational and casual to use terms people are familiar with. There’s nothing wrong with that.

OK, I was caught out that one time when I confused a prosthetic for a live human being but that’s not quite what I mean.

Yes, that was the sort of thing I did in my spare time: attended lectures on mass fatality protocol and capacity building in post-conflict regions rather than head out to the students’ union for Red Bull and vodka.

During a radio interview I once had a woman point out that her weight still being an issue after death was an irritating thought, and I can see her point.

Though this has actually now changed to a Level 3 and Level 4 Diploma.

Incidentally, he gives his name to the Abernethy Biscuit, a sweet baked snack which was created in 1829 to aid digestion. This is because he believed diseases were frequently the results of disordered states of the digestive organs, and were to be treated by purging and attention to diet◦– a theory still very popular today.

This from my favourite paper, the Pam Fisher one…

We changed into new scrubs every day, throwing the old ones into the laundry for the hospital linen services to collect, wash and redeliver. Sometimes after decomps we’d remove them, shower and wear new ones.

Interestingly, we are taught to ignore our natural reflexes in the PM room and if we drop something to allow it to fall. This is because trying to catch a PM40 or brain knife in mid-air could result in the loss of several fingers. It’s a strange thing to get used to.

It’s also due to dehydration and the skin shrinking back, which is what makes the fingernails look as though they grow too. They don’t, of course.

Unbelievably, something like this has happened before. Pope Formosus was exhumed from his grave in Rome in AD 897 and put on trial in what became known as the Cadaver Synod (or, more appropriately, Synodus Horrenda ).

In case you’d like to learn yet more languages, sarco comes from the Greek for ‘flesh’ and phage means ‘eat’. A sarcophagus is so named because people believed placing their dead in stone coffins helped the flesh to be consumed. And if anything, at least you now know it helps to be multi-lingual when studying decomposition.

Frankincense and myrrh were involved, and it’s said that the fact they were given to the baby Jesus by the Wise Men was a portent of his early death.

Maiden, Mother and Crone are pagan archetypes used to describe the stages in a woman’s life as well as the three faces of the moon: waxing, full and waning.

Incidentally, they have pubic hair◦– real pubic hair, shaved from cadavers and added to the model◦– yet no underarm hair. I suppose they have their own ‘waxers’? Bah-bum-chhhhh.

I find it quite humorous that the Church ever did want to ‘own’ the heart as a sort of trademark given that another explanation for its shape is fairly risqué: the cardioid represents genitals. The right way up it represents the vulva, and upside down, the testicles.

This became hilariously evident to friends of mine when we were in restaurants that announce that hot food is ready to be served by ringing a bell on the dumb waiter. Every single time the bell went I’d jump out of my seat. It took ages for me to repress that response once I’d left the Municipal Mortuary.

Formalin is the aqueous solution used in the preservation of tissue, not formaldehyde, which is a gas. Formalin is formaldehyde distributed through water, and it’s used in mortuaries, histology labs, etc.

The charity Diabetes UK recently released information stating that diabetes-related amputations had reached an all-time high of 135 a week.