Working Stiff

The sub-title of this book by Dr. Judy Melinek and her husband T.J. Mitchell is "Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner." I read a blurb about this book in a book catalog and, rather than buy it, I checked it out of the library and found it sufficiently engrossing to read the whole thing. Although she started a surgery residency after completing medical school, Melinek soon came to believe that the conditions of the residency threatened the health of both patients and residents and she switched to forensic pathology. She did her residency at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City. This is considered one of the very best residency programs in the field and she felt it offered her the opportunity to continually learn more about the human body and how it functions or fails to function.
She tells a series of vignettes about the cases she work on, including discussions of various ways that the families of the deceased deal with their deaths. Homicides were not a large percentage of her cases, but she did help convict a number of killers through thorough work and documentation. On the other hand, she felt some people got away with murder because assumptions were made about the victims' life styles or because the police were unwilling to investigate.  Since her father committed suicide when she was a teen, she felt a particular empathy with the families in those cases. She even had a stalker--a mother who could not accept that her son had died of a drug overdose and wanted the death certificate change to indicate his death was due to accident or homicide.
Melinek was in the middle of her residency when 9/11 occurred and she documents in detail what the process was like to deal with the remains of nearly 3,000 victims. Within a month of that disaster, a plane crash in Queens killed almost 300 people, further straining an already overloaded system. She speaks highly of the professionalism, expertise and compassion of her co-workers.
A really interesting read, presented in a sympathetic and totally non-sensationalistic manner. Technical terminology is usually explained pretty clearly. Appeals to our morbid fascination with death. Reviews available from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Kirkus.