We survive FMED 500 and the Mayan prophecy...

And move onto FMED 501, an introductory course into the principles of forensic medicine.  Here, we get to the “heart” of the track, so to speak – the basics of crime scene investigation, the science of fingerprints, forensic photography, the study of blood splatters...  The latter topics will be covered in my next post, but for now, I’ll just touch briefly on a few of the highlights from the first class.

We began the course by building off the pathological processes we learned in the previous trimester and get a general overview of the post mortem changes that take place, e.g. rigor mortis, changes in body temperature and color, skin slippage and marbling, other characteristic physical and chemical changes etc. And also got the chance to exercise our deductive reasoning skills, Law and Order style, running through a couple of different scenarios and debating what the manner of death is, for instance, of someone who dies while playing Russian roulette.  Accident? Suicide?  Switching gears from a biological and clinical background to a legal one was not only thought provoking, but dare I say, even fun?

Much to my surprise, a particularly interesting section for me was the forensic entomology workshop.  Frankly, and maybe, I’m the only one on this island of thought, but I never really found the world of insects especially exciting.  Maybe it’s due to my instinctual first hand response to search and destroy most critters that cross my path, but with that being said, it was really interesting to learn about the essential role insects play in body decomposition and how the stage at which the collected specimen is found in can help provide vital information such as relative time frame of death.   Furthermore getting a hands on look at some common, and not so common, species of flies, maggots, and beetles, and inspecting their anatomy macroscopically and microscopically was especially cool and and identifying their structures gave me a better understanding of their role in crime scene investigation.

I'm looking forward to the next set of classes and writing about some of the hands on activities and learning more of the social science perspective of forensics.  I'll keep you posted.

See you in 2013!