You know those TV Shows / Movies where they see a bullet wound and think it was a gun then the medical examiner tells them that he was poisoned before being shot? How does he determine that?
In: Biology
It depends….if someone was poisoned then died from being shot before the poison could kill them, cause of death would be the bullet wound despite the poisoning happening first.
Alternatively if someone is poisoned, then they die, then are shot, cause of death is the poison.
What it comes down to is the medical examiners know what signs to look for to determine cause of death, if you shoot a dead body, blood isn’t exactly going to be pumping out of it because the heart has already stopped. I’m not medically trained so I don’t know exactly what they look for, but the way blood pools in the body is going to be different if the blood is escaping through a bullet wound vs having been shot after their heart stopped.
In short, biological processes are affected differently based on what caused the body to stop working. Medical examiners find as many signs as they can within the body, and use all that information to determine what most likely caused the body to cease functioning, even when multiple potential causes of death are present.
Latest Answers