About Autopsy

In an autopsy, an examination of the major organs is made after death in order to work out what diseases were present and how they caused the death of the patient.

The word 'autopsy' comes from the Greek, meaning 'to see for oneself'. It has the alternative name of 'post mortem', which is Latin for 'after death'.

Naked-eye appearances of body tissues are frequently enough to establish disease states. The diagnosis can often be refined though, by additional investigations such as examination of tissues under the microscope (histology) or chemical studies of blood, urine, stomach contents and other body fluids.

Autopsies are performed by medically qualified doctors who have specialised in the discipline of histopathology. These are the same doctors who diagnose disease in tissue samples and surgical specimens taken from living patients.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, autopsies were at the forefront of medical research. The autopsy played a major role in how we learned to distinguish between different diseases, in understanding what effects they have on body functions, and in finding out whether our treatments were having any effects, good or bad.

Autopsies still have a vital role to play. The information that they provide on what was actually going on inside a patient, compared to what the clinical teams thought was happening, supplies vital feedback that helps to maintain high standards of medical care.

Autopsies are also important for training new generations of doctors. It is a worrying modern trend that medical students are getting to see fewer and fewer autopsies for themselves and this inevitably restricts their understanding of disease.

Surveys show that autopsies are highly valued by the relatives of the deceased, especially in circumstances where death was sudden or where the cause of death was uncertain. In these situations, the clarity provided by an autopsy often removes doubts about whether anything more could have been done, enabling discussion to focus on what really happened and allowing grieving to begin sooner than would otherwise be the case.