Intertexts

The word autopsy means "to see (psy) with one's own eyes (auto)." This postmortem examination is all about seeing; it allows physicians to see internal parts of dead bodies. And everyone can see the practice of this examination resulting in stigmata on the body. When a physician carries out an autopsy, he practices multiple skin incisions and these scars cannot always be kept out of the public sight.

The physicians of nineteenth-century France met dead bodies on various occasions, mainly while practicing dissections, morbid anatomy, embalmment and forensic medicine. Among these postmortem examinations, forensic or medico-legal autopsy was an exception. Every time someone died in unnatural circumstances, the mortal remains merited examination. It meant that all the victims of murders, accidents, and suicides were supposed to be opened up in order to find out the cause of death. However, legal authorities, such as district attorneys, examining magistrates, or mayors, were the only ones entitled to order this particular dissection. So its purpose was judicial, not scientific.

The wounded or dead body first became a source of evidence during the Ancien Régime (sixteenth- to eighteenth-century France). Criminal justices renounced arbitrary power systems in favor of investigation methods in order to collect scientific and objective proofs to accuse someone of murder; and the corpse was essential in this quest for evidence (Porret 37-60). The aim of the investigation and of the trial—finding and punishing the murderer—was more powerful than ethical concerns, such as the deceased's bodily integrity or the feelings of grieving relatives. Thus, legal authorities did not hesitate to use the mortal remains and to ask for an examination that would irreversibly disfigure the deceased.

The judicial context lets one suppose that nineteenth-century medical experts had to follow a precise operative protocol. But the opposite was true: There were no operative directives and no official protocols concerning the conduct of a forensic autopsy. So the requisitioned physicians could employ any technique they found appropriate for the body's examination. These operative liberties, and the judicial suspension of all prohibitions concerning ordinary postmortem examinations of which they were the result, will be at the core of this article.

Several authors of forensic medicine books disapproved the lack of technical and ethical rules in forensic autopsies. Nineteenth-century medical ethics codes did not give any prohibitions concerning these examinations either. Some of these codes [End Page 20] only dealt with dead bodies that would be used for dissections and scientific necropsies and did not say a word about medico-legal autopsies (Simon 80-85; Lechopié and Floquet 147-51). Other codes did not even mention the subject of postmortem examinations and dead bodies (Amette; Moureau and Lavrand). So the authors who were worried about the lack of rules in forensic examinations tried to establish their own autopsy protocol. But were ethical questions the main purpose of the specialists of forensic medicine?

This article suggests some answers to this question. The first part describes the differences between the various postmortem examinations centered around two rules: the waiting period before an invasive examination of the corpse, and the forbidden bodies that physicians were not allowed to open. The second part focuses on the opposition between morbid anatomical examination and forensic autopsy in regard to the visibility of each examination and the consequences such visibility could have on operative techniques and prohibitions. The third part of the article offers the public's perspective. Some of the medical practices followed after examination of the dead body shocked the public. Consequently, as discussed in the last part, forensic authors advised physicians on post-examination care of the mortal remains and suggested a new autopsy protocol.