You are at the funeral home and you receive a death call from a family who has not heard from Uncle Joe for two days. It is fall and the weather is cool so you do not have to worry about rapid decomposition like you would in the hot 80 to 90 degree summer months. Upon arrival and making the removal the family states that they would like to have visitation with an open casket. Discuss and explain the postmortem changes that you may encounter. Remember, you are not embalming yet, only discuss the postmortem changes I would have to ask myself how the man died and where? The manner and location of death can influence the rate of decomposition, which determines the condition of the body. The position and environment of death could also determine the status of the body, warm locations can decay the body at a much faster rate than cold locations. Common post mortem changes are listed below: …show more content…
Hypo stasis - is the pooling of blood to lower section of the body.
Purge - when the bodies clears gas and liquids from a natural orifice such as nose and mouth. Rigor Mortis - stiffening of muscles that may occur up to 6 hours but most commonly 2-3 hours. This is a chemical change of acid such as lactic acid and a decrease in the pH which leads to an acidic condition. Dehydration - the loss of fluids, most often seen in eyes. Algor Mortis - the cooling of the body losing approximately 2 degrees an hour slowly reaching room temperature. The ambient temperature can also determine the temperature of the body posibly warming the body instead of cooling it, Some of the contributing factors includes clothing, the environment, and disease. Defecation - defecation may result with the relaxation of bowel muscles. Livor Mortis - a discoloration of the lower regions of the body cause by hypostasis resulting in a blue or red discoloration. Desquamation - skin slip usually found when the body is subject to moist warm
areas. The request of an open casket by the family would require extensive restorative work, we must not promise the family anything but to try our best to make their request possible. Sometimes we may not be able to make a request for the family resulting in a closed casket, it fully depends on the condition of the body when found. We never know what may happen throughout our lives so it is important not to promise the family anything until we know the condition of the body and know that we can complete their request.
Another case is that of 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson whose death was initially ruled the result of accidental suffocation. A second autopsy produced a different conclusion, but when the second autopsy was performed, his body had been stuffed with newspaper, and his organs were missing ("Organ Trafficking, Melanin Theory & the Fountain of Youth -," n.d.). The brain, heart, lungs and liver were missing. He also discovered Johnson's death was due to blunt force trauma to the right side of his neck (Archer,
The funeral was supposed to be a family affair. She had not wanted to invite so many people, most of them strangers to her, to be there at the moment she said goodbye. Yet, she was not the only person who had a right to his last moments above the earth, it seemed. Everyone, from the family who knew nothing of the anguish he had suffered in his last years, to the colleagues who saw him every day but hadn’t actually seen him, to the long-lost friends and passing acquaintances who were surprised to find that he was married, let alone dead, wanted to have a last chance to gaze upon him in his open coffin and say goodbye.
person has led a good life, he would let them go to the afterlife. The
humidity or lack of air, so the recuperated body doesn’t decay even farther if kept
At the University of Tennessee, they leave bodies to decay in different situations and circumstances. This helps them study time of death and possibly the cause as well. The main things to look for when you are determining the time of death is the severity of insect infestation and physical decaying of the body.
His head and upper leg bones had been laid out in a skull and crossbones fashion. Physical anthropologists found that the man died of consumption, or modern day Tuberculosis. This would have caused those infected to grow pale, lose weight, and to waste away. These attributes are often linked to vampires and their victims. The researchers noted that “the vampire’s desire for food forces it to feed off living relatives, who suffer a similar ‘wasting away’” in an article in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The locals also seemed to have decapitated the suspect to avoid its vengeance from the grave. Many archaeologists who have studied these vampire burials believe that vampires arose from common misunderstandings about diseases (tuberculosis), and from a lack of knowledge about decomposition. The majority of 19th-century American and European people knew about the changes in the human body immediately following death, but they hardly saw what happened in the grave during the following weeks and months. For example, when the gastrointestinal tract begins to decay, it produces a dark fluid that could easily be mistaken for fresh blood during exhumation, creating the vision of
Rigor Mortis is the stiffening of the body which begins a couple hours after you die. Scientists can try to identify when the body died by Rigor Mortis. For a few days after death, some of the cells are still alive. The body will change color, the body gives off a smell, and about a week after death, the skin will begin to blister. About a month after the hair will fall out, and nails too.
It smelled sterile, of chemicals, of death. I had requested beforehand, that the children be allowed to see their father privately. No need for gawking and unnecessary displays of emotion directed at little humans, who could not truly grasp what was happening. I tried not to look at anyone as we passed by the small groups of people scattered here and there…..staring, I knew they were staring. I heard my ex-mother-n-law call out to my 9 year old daughter. I pulled her closer and we walked into the viewing room. My children began to cry. Again, I do not recall what was said. I remember that they put their notes into the casket. I remember looking at my ex-husband and thinking that this was a dream, that he didn’t look how I expected him to look. I don’t know what I thought he would look like. We stood there, for what seemed an eternity. It was probably no more than ten minutes. We exited, and immediately the children were whisked away by relatives who wanted to comfort with good intentions. It seemed that the children were drawing on the emotions they displayed. The funeral began an hour after we had arrived. My husband and I sat in the back of the room, while my children sat in the front with their grown siblings, grandmother, uncle and cousins. I surveyed the small room. Very few flower arrangements were present. I began to notice faces. No one I knew except for his family. The few people that I
I was in the laboratory yesterday talking with my fellow colleagues when one of them suddenly brought up the peculiar observations he had lately found in the anatomy of a deceased hand. I was intrigued by his discussion of his discoveries and asked him if I could help him dissect it even more. He agreed and led me to his table where the hand was laid out on the table before us. My colleague told me the hand had been deceased for two days, but by the looks of it the hand looked to have been deceased for weeks.
After death, rigor mortis is first visible in the body’s smaller muscles, including those in the face and upper body. It takes some time for it to show up in larger muscles. So the fact that the victim is showing rigor mortis only in the face and upper body indicates that she has not been dead for very long – about two hours (Claridge, 2016). It was noted that lividity is also visible in the posterior region of the victim but is not fixed. This fits the two-hour timeline, as lividity begins within the first hour of death and does not become fixed until after six hours.
Post-mortem photography was once a very popular American practice in the mid to late 19th century, and it was considered a healthy practice by families grieving for their loved ones. Such photographs were labeled memento mori, remembrance photographs, or memorial photographs rather than simply post-mortem photos. Since the invention of the daguerreotype process, “portrait photographers offered postmortem photos as a special service” (Hilliker 247). Often, only the upper half of the corpse would be photographed, but it was also common for full-body pictures to be taken where the corpse would be shown as seated or sleeping, sometimes with family members posed alongside them (Hilliker 247-250). The photographs were commonly “mounted on walls in parlors and bedrooms,” and were also kept i...
Tips for choosing a good detox diet can benefit a person who's finally made the choice to attempt to clean his or her body of accumulated potentially-harmful toxins and impurities. The name given to the procedure which has as its aim the excision of all these toxins, chemicals, heavy metals and other substances from the body is "detox," or more formally; detoxification.
It has been found that the decomposition process is best divided into five stages: fresh stage, bloated stage, decay stage, post-decay stage, and remains. The fresh stage starts the moment the individual died and lasts until bloating can be observed. The bloated stage is usually within two to seven days after death. Putrefaction begins at this stage and the gases produced from bacteria cause...
Post Mortem by Patricia Cornwell is a crime-fiction novel that follows the personal life and career life of Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist and the Chief Medical Examiner of Richmond, Virginia.
“That is so weird, Why would you want to work with dead people”, “You are such a weird person, I thought you would want to be a doctor or something”, “That is so gross, the thought of dead people” are the appalling replies I receive when someone ask me what I am planning to major in. When, I was younger, I realized that I had an interest in the medical field, I didn’t want to become the norm such as a doctor, pediatrician or even a nurse. I wanted to help others in my community, but I wanted to have a career in something that no one else would have the guts to even do or even have the strongest stomach to do, I wanted to become a Mortician, someone who works with the deceased and their