Down Among the Dead Men Read Online Free

very few hospital (for educational or research purposes)
post-mortems – which require the consent of the next of kin because the cause of death is already known – were being done. This was because families, given the choice, very rarely want
their loved ones literally internally examined.
    Whether a cause of death is unnatural is not always as clear-cut as you may think, either. Obviously, cases of suicide, violence by a third party (which would require a forensic autopsy by the
Home Office Pathologist and not just a Coroner’s autopsy) or accident are unnatural, but so is industrial disease, and so is neglect, whether self-neglect or neglect by someone else.
    This leads me on to Amber Court . . .
    I had been in my new job less than a week when I met my first body from Amber Court which had come to us for post-mortem. Amber Court is a large residential home on the other
side of Gloucestershire; it has a reputation for being low cost and, in residential care as in most things in life, you get what you pay for. It houses a large number of frail and elderly people,
and is staffed by the least talented members of society. As long as they can walk and breathe, the owners of Amber Court are happy to employ them; they are paid to do a very bad job and, in return,
those in their care are treated with no respect and little, if any, kindness. I imagine a little fat greedy man, sitting in a back office tucked away somewhere, rubbing his hands together at all
the money he is making by providing so-called care.
    As this is common knowledge throughout Gloucestershire, almost every death they have in Amber Court gets reported to the Coroner. It is his statutory duty to rule out neglect in cases of
unexpected death, and that, inevitably, means that most deaths at Amber Court end up having a post-mortem.
    Clive did a quick evisceration of an elderly, frail, almost gossamer-thin lady – Mrs Ethel Humbler – that took him no time at all, but it turned out to be fascinating. Ed was on PM
duty again, and what he found made everyone stop the banter and friendly insults that were being fired around and led Clive to turn down the volume on the radio. In Mrs Humbler’s throat,
wedged right down in the trachea, was a paper napkin. It was almost spooky when Ed flattened it out, because written in the corner was Mrs Humbler’s own name. It was immediately obvious what
had happened; in their uneducated wisdom, her so-called ‘carers’ had left her, despite the fact that she had full-blown dementia, to help herself to her own lunch. In her own confused
world, Mrs H had obviously felt compelled to consume everything that was laid out in front of her and, with no one around to stop her, she had stuffed the napkin into her mouth. It had become
lodged in her throat leading to what I can only imagine to be a lonely and scary death.
    So, Ed had a cause of death for the Coroner but, as Clive said afterwards, that would not be the end of it. For the time being, this would be an accidental death, but there are accidents and
there are ‘accidents’; some are more avoidable than others and it’s the Coroner’s job to sort out the two types. I vowed secretly that I would never allow any of my family
to go into care; I would rather struggle to look after them, no matter how hard that was, than allow this to happen to one of mine. How were Mrs Humbler’s family going to react?
    After the PM, Mrs H was reconstructed by Clive to nearly her former glory and ended up actually looking more peaceful than before, then placed in the body store alongside the rest of the poor
souls who reside with us while they await collection by the undertakers.
     
    FIVE
    Like most people, I had always assumed that mortuaries dealt only in dead people, but it had become apparent very quickly that there was a large stream of other kinds of thing
coming through. The first time this was brought home to me was quite early on when I answered the bell of the main red