Medical Examiner

Blood, guts, and dead bodies might be awesome around Halloween, but the rest of the time, you don’t really want to see them. Unfortunately, if you’re a Medical Examiner, those three are a pretty standard part of your job.

Like Coroners, Medical Examiners handle the bodies found at crime scenes. You get called in when a body is found under suspicious circumstances, like in the case of a violent death, suicide, or a contagious disease.

It’s your job to determine how the person died, which means performing an autopsy. In an autopsy, you look for clues as to what happened to the victim. You might check for evidence of drugs, alcohol, or other chemicals in their blood.

The ability to perform autopsies is the main thing that separates you from Coroners. Medical Examiners are required to be licensed Physicians, and many of them are Forensic Pathologists. A Forensic Pathologist is essentially a Doctor who specializes in determining causes of death.

During your autopsy, you might also be charged with identifying the victim. You do this through dental records, facial reconstruction, or DNA samples. Throughout the process, all the information you find needs to be carefully recorded.

Especially in the case of suspicious deaths, there’s often a police investigation or court case that follows your findings. Your autopsy report can be used as evidence, and you can be called as a witness, so it’s important that your findings be easy to understand.

The worst part of this job is notifying the victim’s families. When a body is found, you’re the one in charge of tracking down the family’s contact information, and passing on the personal effects found on the victim.