How are coroners able to find specific details about a dead body, like the time of death, cause of death, and even the distance between the victim and the attacker?
In: Biology
There is a specialty in medicine called pathology, which is the study of disease. Pathologists study disease and death to recognize the signs of early, intermediate and advanced stages of disease. I went with a med student to his pathology lab once, when he was studying gunshot wounds. Point blank wounds had burn marks on the victim’s skin, because of the hot gasses and the hot barrel of the gun. A few feet away, there were markings called stippling, caused by specs of residue. Shots from farther away lacked these signs.
You can test tissue samples from someone’s liver (which filters impurities from your blood) to see what kind of abnormal chemicals are present. These are important clues for cause of death.
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