Postmortem
How Medical Examiners Explain Suspicious Deaths
Postmortem goes deep inside the world of medical examiners to uncover the intricate web of pathological, social, legal, and moral issues in which they operate. Stefan Timmermans spent years in a medical examiner’s office, following cases, interviewing examiners, and watching autopsies. While he relates fascinating cases here, he is also more broadly interested in the cultural authority and responsibilities that come with being a medical examiner. Although these professionals attempt to remain objective, medical examiners are nonetheless responsible for evaluating subtle human intentions. Consequently, they may end—or start—criminal investigations, issue public health alerts, and even cause financial gain or harm to survivors. How medical examiners speak to the living on behalf of the dead, is Timmermans’s subject, revealed here in the day-to-day lives of the examiners themselves.
ASA Medical Sociology Section: Eliot Freidson Award
Won
British Sociological Association: Medical Sociology Book of the Year Prize
Won
“Postmortem is a revelatory account of how medical examiners use the tools of modern science to discern causes of suspicious deaths. Timmermans takes us deep into the grisly world of forensic investigators, with gripping stories from the autopsy table and vivid descriptions of the morgue’s back rooms. His greatest contribution is to explain how and why medical examiners gained the authority to tell us why we die, and to help us understand what their perspective reveals and conceals. An unforgettable book.”—Eric Klinenberg, author of Heat Wave
“This intriguing book builds on an illustrious tradition of explorations into how people give meaning to death. But it shines light in a radically new and largely unexplored direction, focusing on the officially propounded—and sometimes contested—meanings formulated by medical examiners. The investigations that forensic pathologists perform with people’s bodies are the physical analog to the grief that families experience and the symbolic work that societies perform more generally with death and dying. Timmermans explores all three. And, for good measure, he also considers how these examiners cope with uncertainty, make distinctions, assess causality, and create expert knowledge. Timmermans has gone to a strange place, and he has returned with dramatic and careful and instructive tales from the field.”—Nicholas A. Christakis, author of Death Foretold
“The book is beautifully and intelligently written. Packed as it is with valuable and well-referenced information about forensic pathology, the articulation of concepts and issues is of even greater merit. . . . Postmortem is a wake-up call to forensic pathology. . . .This book should be viewed as provocative, rather than threatening, and should be a stimulus for important discussions and action by the forensic pathology community.”—Journal of the American Medical Association
Introduction: Brokering Suspicious Deaths
Bibliography
Index
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