The Autopsy Series: Evisceration

        (If you don’t want to “know guts” don’t read on!) After the external inspection, the autopsy technicians get to work.  This is where the fascination of the human body takes over, and I’m so thrilled to see it. I know, it sounds a little morbid-being excited to see a persons insides, but if you have the stomach for it, you would be fascinated too. 

      The autopsy techs start what is called the evisceration.  This is when they make that Y-incision-they start cutting the skin and muscle away from the ribs and sternum, to open up the body cavity.  What you see when that skin is removed is the chest wall: ribs and sternum. To remove the chest wall, some people use either a stryker saw or the rib cutters (see the tool box).  The chest wall is removed and now you see the organ block.  I was amazed to see that the all the organs actually looked like what they do in text books! Go figure! The techs remove this organ block by cutting the large intestine off the rectum and removing all the attachments all the way up to the tongue. This is amazing. They pull the entire organ block out, holding the tongue on top and the colon on the bottom. I know you’ve seen in the movies where someone’s intestines fall all over the place when they have some major stomach wound, right? Well, that might happen, but not here. When the organ block is removed, the intestines stay all connected and cinched together. No falling all over the place, no hanging wildly, just together. It looks kind of strange at first. But this all makes sense if you think about it: our bodies are connected all the way through from our mouth to our hineys, so why wouldn’t they hang out in our body all together?

        Next the organ block is laid on a table with a big cutting board with very large knives. The knives look like your large knife in your knife set. This is when the doctor gets to work. Every organ is cut away individually and weighed, then they cut into the organs (not the intestines-thank goodness-unless it’s called for!).  They look for any obvious signs of problems, but they more see normal healthy tissue. (I will go into the major individual organs in the next few posts-it takes way too long to talk about otherwise!)

       When the doctor is done with each individual area, he takes a sample of the organ and places into a container with formalin and places the rest into a bag. After the entire process is done, this bag with the organs is placed back into the body cavity and sewn up. Then the decedent is picked up by the funeral home.  Funeral homes are involved in what is called mortuary science, which is a cousin to the APA’s and we are under the mortuary science umbrella. 

Ok, I promise not all my posts will be this graphic!!

*The Autopsy series is what I saw while job shadowing. I haven’t had my forensic rotation yet, so if these descriptions aren’t right-I’ll fix them next year!

Tagged as: autopsy process, evisceration, organ block, y-incision