2023-06-27 12:34:00
Doctor Philippe Boxho was the guest of RTL info with You this Tuesday. The medical examiner wrote a book called “Interview with a corpse” in which he describes this profession that he “adore“.
“You don’t do medicine so as not to treat people and to see the dead. But I discovered this training and this specialty during my studies and indeed, I feel very good regarding it.“, specifies the director of the forensic institute at the University of Liège.
His daily life is very far from the image that we give in the series which are “a fiction“, he recalls. “The series are made to be seen and watched as fiction, but what is said there in relation to the techniques used is not necessarily accurate.“, adds the medical examiner. This is not how it happens in real life, he insists.
The medical examiner is called when the death is suspicious. He must then proceed step by step and the procedure is very precise. “We go there, we will examine the body without the presence of anyone, apart from the police of course. You have to be very calm and you need a good lamp to see well and then the completely naked body must be examined on both sides so as not to miss any lesions.“, he says.
The doctor adds that the approach is always the same. We ask ourselves the question of what lesions there are and then we interpret them. “So we don’t go to the body and say, “Did he pick up a shot? Was he stabbed? Was he beaten?” , but we go towards the body by saying to ourselves “what lesions are there to see” and then relate them to an event“.
He also specifies that death has a smell. “Even someone who is going to die, who is in the agony phase, the smell is there and I smell it right away“, he launches.
“We don’t get used to the smell of putrefaction. Each time, you have to get used to this particularly tenacious smell“, specifies the doctor who can distinguish from afar whether the corpse is a human being or an animal just by smell. “Each species has its smell of putrefaction and the human species has a very characteristic smell“.
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