Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

In Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner, Dr. Judy Melinek, in tandem with her husband, have written a more than average account of her time as an apprentice medical examiner, which overlapped with the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9-11. 

 

Parts of this book may make the squeamish cringe.  She explains that many of her tools can also be found in a butcher shop; when she depicts how a brain is cut into thin slices for examination, I imagined deli slicer working on a breast of turkey .  Melinek does an admirable job illustrating how a medical examiner must treat the human body as a scene for clues; and how the medical examiner must divorce him or herself emotionally from the job of dismembering the human body.

The only time she admits to losing her professional guard is when victims of American Airlines Flight 587 in 2001 were brought to the morgue.  A bag marked “body parts” instead contains small children.  Pregnant herself, she steps back, unable to further look.  A male colleague performed the autopsies in her stead.  In this one case, motherhood, it seems trumped science.  And one can see how.