Thursday 22 September 2011

Emedinews:Insights on Medicolegal issues:What is disinterment in Forensics?

To dig up something buried, especially a corpse is called disinterment

• Many early groups buried the corpse in the ground and exhumed it at a later date for religious rituals, a practice still undertaken by some traditional societies.
• In fourteenth-century France, it became common procedure to dig up the more or less dried-out bones in the older graves in order to make room for new ones.
• The high death rate from the European plagues coupled with a desire to be buried in already-full church cemeteries led to old bones being exhumed so that new bodies could be placed in the graves. In times past, on rare occasions prior to embalming, the body was removed from the ground. This happened when burial professionals or the authorities suspected that the person might have been buried alive.
• The French philosopher and death expert Philippe discussed necrophiliacs who disinterred dead bodies for sexual purposes and scientists who dug up corpses to conduct scientific experiments.
• It is common knowledge that for centuries until cadavers were legally provided medical schools exhumed dead bodies for teaching purposes. One of the reasons the use of the wake was enacted in many societies was to deter those who might steal corpses.
• To test methods for preventing or slowing down the process of postmortem decay. U. Mobus and colleagues describe an usual case of exhumation, in which a young person "exhumed" a child's body involved in a road accident because he wanted to test methods for preventing or slowing down the process of postmortem decay.

(Ref: Anil Aggrawal's Internet Journal of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology Volume 2, Number 2, July-December 2001)

(Contributed by Dr Sudhir Gupta)

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