I was reading an article about a child body found frozen with multiple traumas and I was wondering if somone was left bleeding in freezing weather, how does the autopsy determine between the bleeding and the freezing as the exact cause of death? (It doesn’t have to be only these two competing causes. I am asking about any multiple traumas that could equally cause death.)
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That’s not a quick answer, because a lot of things can cause death. Medical examiners doing an autopsy look at the body in detail, from the outside in. First a careful visual inspection of the skin, noting all sorts of things such as state of decay, lividity, any damage or bruising, material under the nails, and so on is done. That alone can tell you a lot about what happened, for example if there’s a number of stab wounds, but only some show evidence of extensive bleeding, you can probably conclude that those stabs which bled very little occurred post-mortem.
You examine the organs, the contents of the stomach, test the fluid in the eye, bladder and blood for toxins and drugs. If someone shows signs of blunt force trauma, but what you see doesn’t appear to have been fatal, you’d look for what did kill them. With modern tech it’s surprisingly hard to evade a careful examination of a corpse.
Sometimes it’s a matter of logic. If you see the two organs have holes in them and one of them is the heart, you can assume that’s the one that caused your death first.
Death at the cellular level looks different under different circumstances. Cells that were frozen while still functional look different from cells that were starved of oxygen and then frozen.
You also have to understand that certain wounds or diseases, that may cause death, have different symptoms and affect different body systems. For example people can can die from heart failure. Well we can divide that up into two different types. Right sided and left sided. If the right side of someone’s heart failed, and that is what led to theirs death, you’d most likely see severe peripheral edema, or swellings in the limbs especially the legs. Whereas if it was left sided, you would find fluid in the lungs with lots of pink frothy saliva.
Besides obvious trauma, such as “yo homeboy got blasted in the head thee times” are dead anyway. other injuries will cause different reactions in the body and usually that’s is enough for them to determine how a person died.
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