Efforts to unravel the mysteries of death fascinate the living. Given a chance, who wouldn't want to hear from Shiya Ribowsky, formerly a top investigator at the New York City Medical Examiner's Office?
Expecting macabre revelations prompts readers to take an immediate interest in Dead Center, Behind the Scenes at the World's Largest Medical Examiner's Office (by Ribowsky and Tom Shachtman, 2006, Regan, an imprint of HarperCollins, 262 pages). As Ribowsky says, “Death is the final unknown, and it is also unknowable. It is the ultimate mystery, and to me that makes it an irresistible challenge.”
It's a subject with vast variety. “Around 70,000 people die each year in New York City, and they die in every conceivable location – at work and church, in stores and parks, on subways and buses, in restaurants and theaters.... We find many bodies in bathrooms, kitchens, back halls, even inside closets.”
For anyone inexperienced with dead bodies, they can be full of surprises. “...I have to admit I was entirely unprepared for the sounds that a dead body produces. The first time I heard a body groan, the hair stood up on my arms and the back of my neck, and I froze, until I realized what the source must be: a build-up of gas bubbles produced in the course of decomposition. As the bubbles leak out of the lungs, stomach and rectum, they make dead bodies groan, burp and fart – sounds that are sometimes also generated when the body is moved.”
Readers won't be entirely disappointed or fully satisfied. The book has captivating moments, but perhaps fewer than it could have.
Ribowsky claims he did his best work in helping to identify thousands of remains (mostly body parts) after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, part of “the largest forensics investigation ever attempted”. That tough work stirred powerful emotions. “And it was chaos that confronted us that day – an enormous, overwhelming and heartbreaking task that would absorb our every waking moment, and may of our non-waking moments, for the next three years.”
What happened then felt like warfare. “I thought of the OCME's effort after 9/11 as similar to a medic's tour of duty in Vietnam, at least when it came to the psychological battering we all took as a result. The relentless arrival of new remains, the onslaught of grief coming from the families – it was difficult to handle such a ceaseless flow of death....”
But the aftermath of 9-11 makes for comparatively dull reading that fills too much of Dead Center. The decade-ago destruction of New York's World Trade Centre twin towers using hijacked planes holds perpetual relevance for Americans, but everyone else long ago wearied of the endless details.
In the best bits of Dead Centre, Ribowsky tells of investigating smaller-scale crimes and mishaps. “One of the ugliest deaths I encountered during a scene investigation at a hospital was that of a patient who died when the gurney on which he was strapped was sliced in two by a malfunctioning elevator.”
Honestly, he's no fan of medical institutions. “Hospitals are very dangerous places. Between overtired residents, overworked nurses, understaffed wards, complicated machinery, drugs that can have sledgehammer side effects, and good old-fashioned human error, the modern hospital has more ways to kill you than did the Spanish Inquisition.”
Readers pay rapt attention to Ribowsky's study of bodies after murders or accidents, the details of forensic science and how reality compares to CSI and other TV crime shows. “One staple of crime dramas is the plotline in which the body is brought into the autopsy room with no outward signs of the cause of death. That's fiction – it is rare that at autopsy we find a cause of death that has no outward sign, or gave no premonition. Most of the time, when a body is brought in because the precise cause of death was not obvious at the scene, it leaves the autopsy room with a finding that the death was from ‘natural’ causes that were simply not visible on the surface.”
TV shows detour in other ways too. “On countless television crime shows and in just as many crime novels, the pop-up ME magically appears at every crime scene, does a cursory examination and immediately tells the hero/detective, ‘This guy died at 11:27 yesterday morning.’
Sorry, wrong number – way too precise!”
Usually, “Reality is messier, slower and less dependent on star detectives. Major crimes, especially homicides, are not solved by lone detectives egged on by their incredibly savvy and perpetually irritated bosses. Complex crimes are solved by teamwork.”
Yet truth can be stranger than fiction. “In the kitchen, lying on the floor, the mummified body of an elderly 90-pound Chinese woman who is long dead.... I turn her over and it happens – hundreds of cockroaches come pouring out of her mouth, like something out of Freak Show.”
Readers learn much, like how rigor mortis happens and the difference when bodies putrefy or mummify. What one species detests, others love. “Putrefaction may smell bad to human beings, but it smells like ambrosia to insects and even to some animals. A fly can detect the off-gassing of putrane from a carcass a mile away.... Vultures and some scavenging mammals will make a beeline for the source of the aroma that, to them, means dinner.”
Above all, remember the basics in forensics, like “Don't step in that” and “Put on your gloves before you touch anything.” Even some real-life villains may pick up tips. “...vehicular homicide is one of the easiest forms of murder to get away with. ‘Oh, no, I didn't mean to run over her; it was an accident.’ ”
Very little about death turns out to be simple or as it appears. “At the wake, you gaze at Fred, laid out in a very comfortable-seeming casket. He actually looks pretty good, lying there in his nice suit and embalmer's makeup.
You may suspect that it's all set design and special effects, but you don't know the half of it. That casket has no real cushions; Fred's suit probably doesn't have a back. There is wadding stuffed up his nose and in his throat to keep fluids from leaking out, a plug in his backside for the same reason, and if he weren't wearing so much makeup he would look, well, dead.”
The most difficult chapter to read covers autopsies. As if forcing readers to watch each scalpel move, Ribowsky tells what happens step-by-step, how the corpse reacts, what investigators see and the likely conclusions. Anyone with a weak stomach may retch. “Putting aside the scalpel, the ME takes up a whirring saw and uses it to cut off the top of the skull.... When the cap finally comes apart from the rest of the skull, there is a sucking sound like none other I have ever heard.”
Despite the revulsion, there are useful autopsy lessons. “...a smoker's lungs look drastically different from normal lungs. Dedicated smokers develop sooty deposits in their lungs that can turn lung tissue from a normal pinkish-blue-gray color to very black; in advanced cases, the lungs can become stiff and even develop large holes.”
Trained as a physician-assistant, Ribowsky left healing to solve mysteries of the dead. He finds similarities. “An autopsy room is, in many ways, the mirror image of an operating room (OR). At the morgue, unlike in an OR, you gown up but don’t scrub up – because you are protecting yourself, not the patient. For the same reason afterward you make darn sure to scrub down, because the bacteria coming out of a dead body are very alive, and you need to make sure they all go down the drain.”
For 15 years, Ribowsky helped to probe 8,000-plus deaths, many gruesome, troubling and revealing. The settings range from subway tunnels and infested flophouses to posh apartments. He acts as a forensics consultant to Law and Order, a TV show.
Shachtman, the secondary author, has written other books, including Rumspringa: To Be or Not to be Amish and Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold. He hails from Connecticut.
What's the bottom line about Dead Centre? It's a good book that could have been better, one with too much 9-11 rhetoric and too little of the more routine murder, mayhem and mystery.
Approval rating: 64 per cent.
For more information: www.harpercollins.com
(November 28, 2011)
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