So I'm watching CSI:NY the other night. The CSI's determine that there is a body buried in a concrete slab at a construction site.
One of the characters is Dr. Sheldon Hawkes. Here's his character bio: "Hawkes is a Medical Examiner with the NYC Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME). He was a child prodigy who graduated from college at eighteen, and by 24 he was a fully board-licensed surgeon."
Guess what? Hawkes is also pretty good with one of these:
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To extract the body and take it back to the lab, Hawkes gets behind one of those bad boys and cuts a perfect rectangle around the body. These CSI guys can do anything!
They take the huge slab back to the lab and Hawkes begins to extract the body with - ready for this? - a Dremel tool!
CSI is something else again. That's certainly the best use of a prodigy, a medical exxaminer. Not.
I've been to the NY Medical Examiner's office btw. It's a whole building, 5 stories or more plus a couple levels of basement, and pretty wide on First Avenue around 24th St. I guess they do the exams for all five boroughs, the whole city, although I'm not sure of that. I went there to watch an autopsy, but when I saw the guy, and he was about my age, early 20's, I didn't like the idea so much. Years earlier I'd seen an hour or two of an autopsy of a an old woman, who died pretty much from natural causes, and I decided one autopsy was enough. So I left and came back two hours later for my roommate. (The earlier autopsy of the old woman, wasn't so bad, because she was old. One interesting thing is that she smoked, and her lungs were two colors, sort of pink in the center near the bronchial tubes, and the outer circle, half the radius, much more than half of the volume, was dark brown or black, without blood circulation, maybe even dead (I don't know) but not rotting because it was inside her, because of all her smoking.
I also had a law course taught by the Acting Chief Medical Examiner of NYC. In forensic medicine or forensic law or whatever it was called. How medical things related to the law. It was a pretty good course, and really interesting, except for three class sessions. At them, he showed slides of traffic accidents for almost 3 solid hours. About 30 minutes into the first class, I decided that I had already known traffic accidents were bad and I wasn't learning any more than that and I left. The next class I left after a minute or so of slides, and I thought people would follow me, but none did. The third class, I left after a minute or so, and again no one followed me, and if he finished the slides and went back to course work, I don't know. I think I got a decent grade in the class but the whole story would be a lot better if I had actually graduated law school. I don't know if the other students were more callous than I was/am, but they seemed to me to be ready to pay any price to graduate with good grades, and were afraid to walk out.
Though I still think they were bad for me, for my mental health, to look at even the first half hour, I actually forgot most of the pictures pretty quickly. But there is one I stilll remember 40 years later and though it doesn't make me a safer driver, it still makes me sick to think of. And while I thought the ACME was a very good guy in a couple ways, and nothing wrong with him in all the other ways, and I can see showing a half hour's worth to make us safer drivers, I still wonder what would drive him to show 3 hours' worth. I think he taught the same course for one semester every year.
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