If symptoms
persist.. .
DEATH is a terrible thing, of course, and I advise most of my readers to have nothing whatever to do with it. I am glad to report that nearly all my patients take my advice in this respect, though very occasionally they choose to disregard it. They have only themselves to blame for the consequences.
Last week, one of my patients, a very young man of impulsive character, died suddenly in circumstances which the coroner found suspicious. I was request- ed, therefore, to attend his post mortem at the central mortuary, an establishment I had not previously visited.
The social atmosphere in this temple of death can best be described as lugubriously festive. I passed first through the body storage room, which looked rather like a large left-luggage department in a station, or a safe-deposit vault in a bank. We entered the changing room, on whose notice-board was pinned a photograph of two mortuary atten- dants, a man and woman, dressed in bodily fluid-proof aprons and wellington boots, kissing across an unoccupied dis- section table. The caption read 'Me and my gal'.
The pathologist questioned me closely: when had I last seen the patient alive, what medicine was he taking, that kind of thing. In the background hovered a police inspector wearing one of those cheap suits which look so flashy on the dummy in the shop window, so crumpled after five minutes' wear.
The pathologist had a stoop: years of bending over corpses, I suppose. We went into the post-mortem room itself: two corpses almost covered by sheets (one with hair exposed, the other with feet) and my patient, cold and stiff and naked.
`So this is what it all comes to!' I thought to myself, and all manner of banal philosophical reflections came flooding into my mind.
I had not been to a post mortem for a long time, and had almost forgotten those characteristic post-mortem sounds, the removal of the scalp from the skull by tearing, for example. Raised above us slightly was a gallery with a glass rail, against which was pressed — as a hungry urchin's nose against a restaurant win- dow — the paunch of another police inspector. I looked at his face and knew that I should not care to be a criminal (or a suspect, for that matter) who fell into his hands.
A lot of jokes are told at post mortems, and there is a kind of bon- homie which wards off darker thoughts. A photographer in a gown, a very pretty young woman, snapped anatomical fea- tures pointed out by the pathologist. One of the policemen said, 'It's amazing what some people will do to get into a photograph.'
No cause of death was found. There was disappointment all round: we should have to wait now for the toxicology results. There's no doubt that finding a cause lessens everyone's anxiety, even that of small children.
In the hospital corridor I recently overheard a four-year-old boy being told by his parents that his grandmother had died.
`Was she shot or stabbed?' he asked.
Theodore Dalrymple
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