Ever Wanted to Know the Causes of Deaths? Become a Forensic Pathologist to Find it Out Yourself !

Every time a man with the appearance of a homeless dies on the street, people instantly think that he probably was an alcoholic and he finally met his end. But you, as a university of phoenix graduate who attended all the Pathophysiology courses and who now works as a forensic pathologist, are not quite ready to jump on that bandwagon. After all, your job is not to make suppositions on the cause of death, but to really establish what caused it.

It’s a job that few people would want to have; after all it is a bit eerie to spend all your day among corpses, but strangely or not, it’s something you’ve always dreamed of doing. You always had a certain fascination with the TV Shows related to crime investigations. While the general question on the show always was: Who did it?, you were more interested in finding out how did he do it. How did he kill his victim? What killed her? The curiosity of finding these answers ultimately pushed you in the direction of forensic pathology and now you can find out yourself why did people die.

However, despite being used to the images seen in TV shows and reality programs, what you’re doing is the real thing and it can’t be compared to anything you’ve ever seen. Through your job you can send people to prison for homicide or save them, establishing that it was in fact a natural death. A forensic pathologist has a lot of responsibility on his hands. His role is to give a certain closure to all the cases and give the mourning families a feeling of relief, because apart from the question Why did he/she have to die?, what consumes them is the question How did he/she die? Those families will never find their peace unless they find out the causes of death of their beloved ones and your responsibility is to collect and examine the tissue and to interpret the toxicological analyses tissue, to give them an answer.

Patience is key; you have to rule out every other possibility and this means analyzing every wound, every injury and every organ which might provide you with clues. There might be times when you’ll have no difficulty in establishing the cause of death; another time, it will take you days to write your report. Also, there will be times when you’ll get a mutilated body on your operating table and you will have to pull yourself together and do the job and put all the sentimentality aside. The worst feeling you can possibly get is when realizing that it wasn’t an accident or a natural death, but a homicide. Working in this field really makes you understand how cruel is – not the world we are living in, but the people who are living in this world. There are some who are capable of committing the most sadistic things you could have ever imagined and who simply don’t have any boundaries when it comes to torturing others.

Those who have this profession are admirable. What they are doing takes skill, precision, patience and endurance. A strong stomach is required, as well as strong nerves and these are qualities which few people posses. Their job is not to ask, but to answer and in a world full of questions and dilemmas, those answers are very much needed.