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.But in many cities, coroner’s offices weren’t up to the job.Most coroner’s physicians were from the lower ranks of the profession, and few were pathologists.Elite urban physicians led the call for reform of the coroner’s office.Some demanded that physicians be elected to the office; others proposed abolishing the office altogether, punctuating their arguments with descrip-tions of botched murder investigations and autopsies.Medical journals regularly ran anti-coroner rants such as one 1902 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association entitled “The Useless Coroner.”Incompetence wasn’t the system’s only problem.At the turn of the last century, urban coroners in the United States possessed great power.They con-trolled the way evidence was presented to juries and ran detective forces that rivaled those of the police.Power led to corruption.Deputy coroners routinely looted bodies and collected bribes from undertakers.In some cities coroners distributed estates, sometimes embezzling a slice for themselves.If a wealthy woman died after an abortion or a politically connected man died in the wrong area of town, those details could be covered up for a price.In response to the corruption and bad science, Massachusetts established the first medical examiner system in 1877.The difference was that medical examiners were appointed pathologists with special training in forensics and death investigation; coroners were often elected lay people who relied on medical personnel to do autopsies.Most medical examiner systems lacked the political power of coroner’s offices—they were not elected offices and they did not serve subpoenas, hold coroner’s inquests in homicide cases, or issue arrest warrants.After Massachusetts switched to an ME system, New York City followed suit in 1918, and after 1950 a flurry of medical examiner systems displaced or began overseeing coroner’s offices.Some places, like Pittsburgh, clung to the old coroner system by updating it and hiring qualified forensic pathologists to do autopsies.If all coroner’s offices were like the one in Pittsburgh, which has had doctors running it for44 AUTOPSYdecades, fewer people would be pushing for a switch to ME systems.But in most counties, the elected coroner is not a physician.Many are undertakers, and some are in entirely unrelated fields.As recently as 1994, politicians have tried unsuccessfully to replace coroner’s offices throughout the state with medical examiners.After being elected, county coroners in Pennsylvania who lack a forensic pathology background are required to take a forty-six-hour death investigation training course.Well-trained forensic pathologists were scarce until a few medical schools began offering formal training in the 1930s.Physicians had testified in trials for decades, but most had seen only a few violent deaths in their careers and did not understand the science of stab angles, poisons, and gunpowder marks.Throughout the last century, forensic medical training struggled to catch up with other specializations, perhaps because of its idiosyncrasies.First of all, its patients are dead, so instead of studying laboratory slides and live patients, budding forensic pathologists needed to work on bullet-riddled bodies.As a result, they worked in morgues, far from the hospital, a source of the medical profession’s power.Even recently, forensic pathologists have complained that textbooks and training cover the medicine—injury patterns and pathologic changes—but not the practical stuff like how to check the lips of an overdose for medication dye or the proper way to mark and preserve a bullet fragment.The Allegheny County Coroner’s Office was no exception.In 1965, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a five-day series about the shortcomings of the coroner’s office.The opinionated and lurid series, headlined “They’re Getting Away with Murder,” detailed suspicious deaths in which the elected coroner, a cabinetmaker with no medical training, had failed to conduct an autopsy.The morgue back then was primitive, equipped with little more than three ancient porcelain autopsy tables.It lacked even a microscope.One doctor later compared it to the laboratory in the movie Frankenstein.Later that year, the county elected a new coroner, Dr.William R.Hunt, the first physician to run the office.Hunt hired Dr.Cyril Wecht as his chief forensic pathologist, launching one of the most storied careers in Pittsburgh history.AUTOPSY 45In the next three and a half decades, Wecht became the leading debunker of the Warren Commission report on the assassination of John F.Kennedy.He coined the phrase “the magic bullet,” promoted the idea of a second shooter on the grassy knoll, and advised director Oliver Stone on the film JFK.He was arrested after a tussle with a city cop, hollered during county government meet-ings, was restrained from jumping into an election-night scuffle, and called one citizen who criticized him “an insignificant asshole.” He waged bitter political campaigns for coroner, county commissioner, county executive, and U.S.Senate.In 1983, a judge ordered Wecht to repay the county $172,000 for using the coroner’s office and staff for private autopsies and lab tests.(Wecht claimed the money was used to improve the coroner’s office.In 1993, he settled the civil case against him, without apologies, for $200,000.) After that scandal, Wecht took a decade-long hiatus from politics before being reelected as coroner in 1995.During his time as a private forensic pathologist, he traveled the world to investigate or consult on death cases, from David Koresh to JonBenet Ramsey.He served as a running TV commentator during the O.J.Simpson saga and later lent his expertise to a Fox TV special called Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? Along the way he conducted fourteen thousand autopsies, consulted on thirty thousand more, wrote numerous books, and gave up to six speeches a day, relentlessly promoting his passion for forensic pathology.Less publicly, Wecht would revolutionize the coroner’s office in Pittsburgh.In his first winter as chief pathologist, Wecht shivered in his overcoat as he dissected bodies in the building’s unheated basement while new autopsy tables were being installed upstairs.Over the next five years, the coroner’s office also bought thousands of dollars of new laboratory equipment—a spectrofluoro-meter, an X-ray unit, a gas chromatograph, and a camera-equipped microscope.Wecht eventually took over the office, hiring pathologists, toxicology and histology technicians, and photographers.He began training deputy coroners and autopsy technicians in the ways of death investigation.Before long, instead of performing just a handful of autopsies a year, the office was doing hundreds.46 AUTOPSYAnd they began diagnosing murders.In the decade before 1966, the coroner’s office had detected a yearly average of thirty-nine homicides.Over the next five years, that number shot to sixty-one.The improvements couldn’t have come at a better time.In recent decades, murderers and their victims are less likely to know each other, which means that police work is relying less on traditional techniques such as interrogation and more on science-based procedures such as examining trace evidence.Today the autopsy room looks part surgical suite, part torture chamber [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.But in many cities, coroner’s offices weren’t up to the job.Most coroner’s physicians were from the lower ranks of the profession, and few were pathologists.Elite urban physicians led the call for reform of the coroner’s office.Some demanded that physicians be elected to the office; others proposed abolishing the office altogether, punctuating their arguments with descrip-tions of botched murder investigations and autopsies.Medical journals regularly ran anti-coroner rants such as one 1902 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association entitled “The Useless Coroner.”Incompetence wasn’t the system’s only problem.At the turn of the last century, urban coroners in the United States possessed great power.They con-trolled the way evidence was presented to juries and ran detective forces that rivaled those of the police.Power led to corruption.Deputy coroners routinely looted bodies and collected bribes from undertakers.In some cities coroners distributed estates, sometimes embezzling a slice for themselves.If a wealthy woman died after an abortion or a politically connected man died in the wrong area of town, those details could be covered up for a price.In response to the corruption and bad science, Massachusetts established the first medical examiner system in 1877.The difference was that medical examiners were appointed pathologists with special training in forensics and death investigation; coroners were often elected lay people who relied on medical personnel to do autopsies.Most medical examiner systems lacked the political power of coroner’s offices—they were not elected offices and they did not serve subpoenas, hold coroner’s inquests in homicide cases, or issue arrest warrants.After Massachusetts switched to an ME system, New York City followed suit in 1918, and after 1950 a flurry of medical examiner systems displaced or began overseeing coroner’s offices.Some places, like Pittsburgh, clung to the old coroner system by updating it and hiring qualified forensic pathologists to do autopsies.If all coroner’s offices were like the one in Pittsburgh, which has had doctors running it for44 AUTOPSYdecades, fewer people would be pushing for a switch to ME systems.But in most counties, the elected coroner is not a physician.Many are undertakers, and some are in entirely unrelated fields.As recently as 1994, politicians have tried unsuccessfully to replace coroner’s offices throughout the state with medical examiners.After being elected, county coroners in Pennsylvania who lack a forensic pathology background are required to take a forty-six-hour death investigation training course.Well-trained forensic pathologists were scarce until a few medical schools began offering formal training in the 1930s.Physicians had testified in trials for decades, but most had seen only a few violent deaths in their careers and did not understand the science of stab angles, poisons, and gunpowder marks.Throughout the last century, forensic medical training struggled to catch up with other specializations, perhaps because of its idiosyncrasies.First of all, its patients are dead, so instead of studying laboratory slides and live patients, budding forensic pathologists needed to work on bullet-riddled bodies.As a result, they worked in morgues, far from the hospital, a source of the medical profession’s power.Even recently, forensic pathologists have complained that textbooks and training cover the medicine—injury patterns and pathologic changes—but not the practical stuff like how to check the lips of an overdose for medication dye or the proper way to mark and preserve a bullet fragment.The Allegheny County Coroner’s Office was no exception.In 1965, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a five-day series about the shortcomings of the coroner’s office.The opinionated and lurid series, headlined “They’re Getting Away with Murder,” detailed suspicious deaths in which the elected coroner, a cabinetmaker with no medical training, had failed to conduct an autopsy.The morgue back then was primitive, equipped with little more than three ancient porcelain autopsy tables.It lacked even a microscope.One doctor later compared it to the laboratory in the movie Frankenstein.Later that year, the county elected a new coroner, Dr.William R.Hunt, the first physician to run the office.Hunt hired Dr.Cyril Wecht as his chief forensic pathologist, launching one of the most storied careers in Pittsburgh history.AUTOPSY 45In the next three and a half decades, Wecht became the leading debunker of the Warren Commission report on the assassination of John F.Kennedy.He coined the phrase “the magic bullet,” promoted the idea of a second shooter on the grassy knoll, and advised director Oliver Stone on the film JFK.He was arrested after a tussle with a city cop, hollered during county government meet-ings, was restrained from jumping into an election-night scuffle, and called one citizen who criticized him “an insignificant asshole.” He waged bitter political campaigns for coroner, county commissioner, county executive, and U.S.Senate.In 1983, a judge ordered Wecht to repay the county $172,000 for using the coroner’s office and staff for private autopsies and lab tests.(Wecht claimed the money was used to improve the coroner’s office.In 1993, he settled the civil case against him, without apologies, for $200,000.) After that scandal, Wecht took a decade-long hiatus from politics before being reelected as coroner in 1995.During his time as a private forensic pathologist, he traveled the world to investigate or consult on death cases, from David Koresh to JonBenet Ramsey.He served as a running TV commentator during the O.J.Simpson saga and later lent his expertise to a Fox TV special called Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? Along the way he conducted fourteen thousand autopsies, consulted on thirty thousand more, wrote numerous books, and gave up to six speeches a day, relentlessly promoting his passion for forensic pathology.Less publicly, Wecht would revolutionize the coroner’s office in Pittsburgh.In his first winter as chief pathologist, Wecht shivered in his overcoat as he dissected bodies in the building’s unheated basement while new autopsy tables were being installed upstairs.Over the next five years, the coroner’s office also bought thousands of dollars of new laboratory equipment—a spectrofluoro-meter, an X-ray unit, a gas chromatograph, and a camera-equipped microscope.Wecht eventually took over the office, hiring pathologists, toxicology and histology technicians, and photographers.He began training deputy coroners and autopsy technicians in the ways of death investigation.Before long, instead of performing just a handful of autopsies a year, the office was doing hundreds.46 AUTOPSYAnd they began diagnosing murders.In the decade before 1966, the coroner’s office had detected a yearly average of thirty-nine homicides.Over the next five years, that number shot to sixty-one.The improvements couldn’t have come at a better time.In recent decades, murderers and their victims are less likely to know each other, which means that police work is relying less on traditional techniques such as interrogation and more on science-based procedures such as examining trace evidence.Today the autopsy room looks part surgical suite, part torture chamber [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]