DR MICHAEL Curtis, who has held the position of Deputy State Pathologist since 2004, has a very varied working week.
When on call, he is available 24 hours a day to answer call-outs to suspicious deaths nationwide and to carry out State autopsies.
When not on call he attends court and inquests, delivers lectures to medical students, and works from his office, a Portakabin in Marino.
Over the course of a year he carries out between 80 and 110 autopsies.
“I actually like doing dissections. I get a lot of satisfaction out of a good postmortem examination, which is done with the respect and dignity of the deceased person in mind, with the aim of obtaining as much evidence as possible. You go about it in a methodical way. If you’re looking for a knife wound or a bullet wound, you want to show the track and that involves a careful anatomical dissection.”
As a young medical student studying anatomy at the University of Dundee, however, he was not quite as comfortable.
“We started the first dissection on day one of undergraduate life and it was the afternoon of day two before I could bring myself to handle the body. Once that hurdle was crossed, it was crossed.”
While he tries to maintain a professional distance, compartmentalising the working life and keeping it separate from the rest of his life, occasionally there are aspects of the job that affect him.
“Obviously child deaths will touch a heart string. I also feel particularly saddened when somebody dies in the course of their work. When somebody goes out in the morning and says I’ll see you at teatime and never comes home. The low point of all is when you have to deal with grief-stricken relatives. I find that really very harrowing . . . the raw grief of people who have just been bereaved.”
Today in some countries, such as Japan, the “virtual autopsy,” which involves carrying out a CT scan of a cadaver has replaced the postmortem in non-homicide cases, says Dr Curtis. “One of its limitations, I believe, is it’s not good for demonstrating coronary arteries and a lot of deaths are due to coronary arterial disease so they supplement that with blood tests.
“I think in my lifetime, imaging techniques will not be a substitute for the proper autopsy . . .”
Aside from the satisfaction he derives from being able to determine a cause of death, Dr Curtis enjoys teaching and attending court.
