The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [49]
As usual, the recollection of one of Gerald Fox’s immortal definitions forced a smile out of David. This despite his discomfort at the prospect of having to observe the autopsy on Charlotte Thomas.
He was already ten minutes late, but he knew that nothing would be completed except perhaps the preparation of Charlotte’s body and the first incision. Although Fox’s observations were usually right on the mark, David had never felt that his cynical maxim about pathologists was totally accurate. He thought back to his first exposure to forensic pathology, a lecture given by the county coroner just before David’s group of second-year medical students was ushered in to view their first autopsy.
“Cause of death, ladies and gentlemen,” the old pathologist had said, “that is what we in forensic medicine are asked to determine for our medical and legal colleagues. In fact, nobody other than God himself knows what causes a person to die. Nobody. Rather what we can determine is the condition of each organ in a patient’s body at the time of his or her death. From this knowledge, we can deduce with some accuracy the reason for cessation of cardiac, cerebral, or pulmonary fonction—the only true causes of death.
“For example. If a patient is killed by a gunshot wound through the heart, we may say quite safely that death was due to cardiac standstill from a penetrating wound to the heart muscle itself. But what of the patient with a disease like cancer? We might be able to locate cancerous tissue in the liver, brain, lungs, or other organs and certainly, in one respect, may say that cancer is the cause of death. Determining the immediate cause, however, is nigh impossible. Did the heart stop because it was poisoned by some as yet unknown substance secreted by the cancerous cells? Or did lack of sufficient fluid volume, for reasons perhaps unrelated to the cancer itself, cause such an impairment in circulation that the heart could no longer fonction and simply stopped?
“You must keep this in mind whenever you read such diagnoses as ‘cancer,’ or ‘emphysema,’ or ‘arteriosclerosis’ as the cause of a patient’s death. They may have been a cause leading to death, but as to the direct cause of death—that, my friends, remains a mystery in the vast majority of cases.”
A mystery. David hesitated outside the two opaque glass doors labeled AUTOPSY SUITE in gold-leaf letters. A sleepless night and chaotic morning had left him tense and uneasy. The prospect of Charlotte’s autopsy only aggravated those feelings.
Then there was Huttner. Cape Cod was only seventy miles away, close enough for him to make the drive up that morning without much difficulty. Whether or not he would choose to return there after witnessing the autopsy was a different story. David bet himself a long-overdue and much-feared trip to the dentist that Huttner would elect to stay in Boston and resume control of his practice. He had given some thought to turning the bet around so that at least he wouldn’t have to face the Novocain and drill if he lost the last two days of his adventure. In the end, however, he decided that if he lost he would be able to submerge the misery of a visit to the tooth merchant in other, more substantial miseries.
Needles of formalin vapor jabbed deep into his nostrils as he entered the suite. It was a long room, nearly twenty-five yards from end to end. High ceilings and an excess of fluorescent light obscured, in part, the fact that there were no windows. Seven steel autopsy tables, each fitted with a water hose and drainage system, were evenly spaced across the ivory-colored linoleum floor. In addition to the hose, used for cleaning organs during an autopsy and the table afterward, every station had its own sink, blackboard, and suspended scale. A large red number, from 1 to 7, inlaid in the floor, was the only characteristic individual to each one. That is, except for Station 4.
On either side of that table six tiers of wooden risers had been built, identical