— Morgue duty — 1978 —
During my sophomore year in medical school, I had a very interesting yet gruesome job: I worked in the State Medical Examiner’s Office at night as a corpse receiver. My job was to receive any dead bodies that came in after hours and prepare them for autopsy the following day. I had to sleep right there in the morgue while I was on duty. I got a lot of studying done while I was on duty, and, on average, I only had to receive a body about once a week. My most memorable and grotesque experience was the night that I received four bodies which had been burned in an auto accident and ensuing car fire. The paramedics at the scene of the accident unfortunately put the identifying information and papers for each body INSIDE the body bags rather than securing them to the outside of the bag. I had to open each bag to find the information, and on one I had to determine the sex of the body by chipping away all the soot and burned skin and clothing and then spreading the person’s legs apart. It was a grisly night. The whole morgue reeked with the stench of burned flesh. To top the whole experience off, the mortician who brought the bodies in complained of an itch in his leg, so he proceeded to dismantle his left lower leg, which was artificial, and sat there scratching and flexing the remaining stump of a leg with his prosthesis laying on the floor next to him.
I was glad to have earned a little spending money, but I was also glad when my 3rd year medical school schedule required that I quit the job at the morgue.
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