Unnatural Death Confessions Of A Medical Examiner Summary

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In the book Unnatural Death Confessions of a Medical Examiner, the author Michael M. Baden discusses a multitude of topics that deal with the body after a person has died. The deaths that are mainly discussed are homicides, suicides and drug overdoses; these deaths are considered unnatural. Every person wants to live a long life; people jog everyday and eat healthy just to extend their life. However every human body is different and the key to a long life has to do with our arteries. Some people have the luck in the genes to be born with wide arteries which means that even with plaque build up in them there is still enough space for blood to move through them. According to the author the theory that jogging can help prevent heart attacks “had a cimp put in it by Jim Fixx when he died at age 53 of a major heart attack” (Baden 37). Jim had been jogging for …show more content…

The three signs are algor mortis (the temperature of death), rigor mortis (the stiffness of death) and livor mortis (the color of death). However these signs may not always be accurate, cold, heat, exercise and drugs can either speed up or slow down the process of decay. According to the author “rigor mortis begins to show two hours after death and takes twelve hours to peak. When the body dies, some cells live longer than others. They keep chemically active for a while, which is why we can do transplants” (Baden 38). However the stiffness of rigor mortis only remains for about twelve hours and then slowly disappears and the body becomes soft again. Livor mortis begins after the heart stops mixing the plasma and red cells together and the cells causing a red color to appear on the skin beneath. After eight hours the color becomes permanent because the red cells break down and squeeze out of the capillaries. After we die our temperature drops a degree each hour because there is no oxygen fueling the

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