The body store leads directly from the entrance vestibule. It is a large room containing a huge fridge which can house twenty-eight bodies and is fronted by seven tall doors. Opposite these are some cupboards, with a bench top, as well as a sink and waste bins. Every time the porters bring a body into the mortuary, they fill in a sheet that lives on the bench top; it details who the deceased is, where they have come from and which fridge they have been put into, plus a few other facts for continuity. Graham consulted this, and then went to one of the seven fridge doors; when he opened it, I saw that behind it were four metal trays, one above the other, each supporting a full body bag.
He manoeuvred a hydraulic trolley on wheels in front of this, and then proceeded to raise it by pumping a lever energetically at the far end. When it was level with the third tray up, he dragged this out and I saw that it rolled along metal runners. On the outside of the white body bag was a clear plastic pocket containing the person’s details on a small beige-coloured cardboard label.
Graham removed the tag, opened the bag and checked it against similar tags that were tied around the dead person’s wrist and big toe. He did this in a matter-of-fact manner, as if he had done it a thousand times before. Graham is a man of average height, with a pure white head of hair and the cheeks you get from spending a long time out of doors. Very friendly, he is full of stories about everything which he tells in a deep, cosy voice bathed in a broad Gloucestershire accent; I felt very comfortable in his company from the word go. He has no airs or graces and talks a lot about how things have changed.
When Graham opened the large white body bag containing Mr Evans, I was shocked to see what lay before me. Mr Evans was an elderly gentleman, and I expected to see a body that looked as though it was at rest. What I did see was a frail old man with head tilted back, eyes staring wide and mouth gaping open. Graham noticed straight away that I was taken aback. He explained to me about the muscles in the jaw relaxing at death and making the mouth drop open, but not about the eyes and the arched neck. At that point, Clive came into the body store and said that Mr Evans was going for autopsy, so could we take him through to the post-mortem room and put him on the middle table?
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Graham had stripped Mr Evans and placed a wooden block under the middle of his back so the torso was raised and the spine slightly curved to expose the neck. Graham checked the identification on Mr Evans against what was written on the postmortem request. Having satisfied himself that this was the right person, he told me that identification of the body is our most important responsibility; every so often the wrong body gets eviscerated, and what follows is a tidal wave of trouble. The next of kin, not surprisingly, tend to become upset when they discover what has happened. From the way he spoke, I guessed that he might have committed this sin in the past, but I did not want to pry further because it was obviously painful; however, it lodged at once in my head as something to avoid and something to be worried about.
Graham had a tray of instruments on the table with him, resting on Mr Evans’ legs. From this tray he took a knife; it was about the size of a table knife, but with a disposable blade that looked as though it would cut through steel. Graham placed the tip of this at the top of the torso, in the midline just below the Adam’s apple, and ran it down with a single, easy sweep to end just above the pubic hair. Sticking his fingers in a small, deeper incision that he had made in this slit just under the ribcage, he then cut down through a couple of layers of fat and muscle to expose the guts; he extended this down towards the feet so that all the abdominal organs were exposed. This done, he then began to gently retract the skin from the ribs, slicing it off with practised strokes of a knife laid flat to the ribs, so that within a couple of minutes Mr Evans’ skin was completely free of the front of his body, hanging away from it. It looked as if you would almost be able to zip him right back up.
He rinsed off his knife, which was apparently called a PM40, and replaced it in his tray. After that, he washed off any blood that was on the table, and was telling me about how some corpses ‘bleed’ more than others depending on how long they have been dead as he picked up what looked like a pair of small stainless steel garden shears. He opened them up and put the blades around the lowest of Mr Evans’ ribs on the right-hand side. He began to cut upwards, severing each rib with a crunch and then moving on up to the next until he reached the top; he did this on both sides, and thereby removed the front of the ribcage, pulling away a big triangle like a prehistoric crab. This exposed the heart, lungs and most of the liver. He placed the ‘crab’ to one side and moved down the table so that he was over Mr Evans’ bowels, which were fully exposed and waiting to be unravelled.
Next, Graham took a pair of scissors and cut through a piece of gut near the stomach. He tugged at the guts and began to unwind them, cutting as he did so through the fatty membrane that was holding them in place. Within a very few minutes, the bowels were lying in a stainless steel bowl at Mr Evans’ feet. While Graham was doing what he had done a hundred times before, I started to notice the smell. I stood thinking of what it reminded me of. Graham told me how he used to work in a slaughterhouse, and then it hit me. The smell was almost the same as in the butcher’s. By the time I had gathered my thoughts, Graham had loosened the remaining organs from the back of the opened torso – although I missed how he had done it – and he now had his PM40 up inside Mr Evans’ throat, busily working away under the skin, pushing the blade into the floor of the mouth. After a few moments he had cut through this and around the back of the tongue so that he was able to free the mouth and neck organs. What he did then was like some sort of gory magic trick; he pulled the tongue down through the throat, everything still intact, and then he continued to pull everything away from the spine – lungs, heart, liver, stomach, spleen, kidneys . . . It amazed me then – and still amazes me now – how all the organs are attached to each other.
By doing this, he had released all Mr Evans’ organs from his body, and was now holding what he told me was referred to as the ‘pluck’. Grasped firmly in Graham’s hand were Mr Evans’ neck structures, his tongue resting on Graham’s hand while suspended below was every other major organ except the gut and the brain. He placed all this in a second stainless steel bowl, and placed both of the bowls on the dissection bench ready for the pathologist. Graham got cleaned up and we both took off our protective equipment, changed into clean scrubs and went back to the office for coffee. Clive had already rung the pathologist, Dr Ed Burberry, who had told him he would be down at ten thirty to start, so we still had an hour before he was due to arrive. Graham and I took our drinks and went and sat under the canopy outside the double doors to the mortuary to have a smoke.
~~Down Among the Dead Men -by- Michelle Williams
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