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Forensic Pathology
Postmortem: How Medical Examiners Explain Suspicious Deaths
by Stefan Timmermans, 367 pp, $30, ISBN-13 978-0-226-80398-2, ISBN-10 0-226-80398-8, Chicago, Ill, University of Chicago Press, 2006.
JAMA. 2006;296:707-708.
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Despite the current explosion of television shows and publications in forensics generally and in forensic medicine specifically, Stefan Timmermans, PhD, has managed to produce a unique contribution. Postmortem is not written out of a macabre and voyeuristic fascination with death or the intellectual stimulation of a whodunit. Instead, the author, who is professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, asks, as a sociologist, why forensic pathologists do what they do and why their work is given legitimacy by society. To answer these questions, Timmermans spent three years observing the inner workings of a medical examiner's office. The result is a stunningly perceptive, insightful, and revealing view of the profession.
Sociologists rigorously scrutinize as outsiders professions that they study and, consequently, are often received as excessively critical and naive. This is certainly true of medical sociologists. I noted that many of my colleagues viewed this work with skepticism and concern. . . . [Full Text of this Article]
Victor W. Weedn, MD, JD, Reviewer
Visiting Professor, Duquesne University
Pittsburgh, Pa
weednv@duq.edu
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