I have witnessed autopsies and for the sake of sanity the person doing the autopsy, an ME or other physician, often has to remain aloft and objective to scientifically complete the autopsy.
So now I am going to get graphic, ample warning; in an autopsy they take a knife, scalpel, an cut a big “Y” in your chest, with the top of the “Y” being at the top of the chest. They peel back the “Y” to open the chest cavity, and they remove your organs, sometimes only a few and other times they remove all of them. They weigh them, run chemicals through them, shine a UV light on them, and do other tests to determine the cause of death.
They then may take a small circular saw and remove your scalp and skull cap. Then they remove your brain and weigh it. It is done with a professional attitude not to disrespect the body, but the body does not resemble a human being when they are doing an autopsy, sometimes called a postmortem examination. It is even more gut wrenching when this procedure is preformed on a baby or young child who died under either suspicious circumstances or has an unknown cause of death. Watching an infant be autopsied will stay with you all your life if you live to be a hundred.
Now everyone is not autopsied, usually only those who have not been under a doctors care recently and have no recent medical record, or those who die suspiciously or the cause of their death needs to be clarified, receive autopsies. Just because a person is shot with a gun and dies does not mean they know the cause of death. They need to know how the bullet killed that person, what organs did it pierce, etc. But my point is that the ME in the T.V. show you referenced was probably not referring to all dead people, he, or she, was probably just trying to tell their colleague that you can not personalize it when you are doing a postmortem physical exam.
Saying they are not people may be said more for those who are doing those exams rather than it is against those who have died. When I used to watch autopsies as a person who worked in the medical field, I used to say to myself “that person is no longer there.” Is this the same as saying this is no longer a person, or people? Physicians are usually in a hurry to complete an autopsy, especially in county hospitals, because morgues are seldom without corpses needing an examination. Sometimes all of the organs are not put back in the body when the exam is completed, or they may just dump the organs back into the chest cavity in no particular order; definitely not in an order consistent with human anatomy and physiology. I have also seen ME’s loosely sew up the big “Y” they made on a corpses chest because they had so many other corpses waiting, and later when the mortuary came to pickup the body organs fell out of the body onto the floor. Had this happen to me when I was an ambulance EMT picking up a body for a family to take to a funeral home; we moved the body from the morgue slab to our ambulance gurney and a lot of the organs fell out of the body onto the floor.
Yes, I am deliberately being graphic because having a personal connection with the dead is one thing and doing an incredibly aloft scientific examination of a dead body is something else. I am sure there are ME’s that view the dead as “people.” But I don’t see what you have shared as an insult. Keep in mind also that some ME’s hold spiritual views and some do not; they may be an atheist and don’t accept the belief in an afterlife. So this just might be a question about personal beliefs and what one is willing to accept. Seems I was long winded here.
