Autopsy and forensic medicine
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When the conspirator Suirei is found dead, a physician confirms her death and performs an autopsy. Maomao secures permission to visit the morgue and conducts her own examination of the body. She checks the physical signs, observes the corpse’s characteristics, and draws conclusions about the circumstances of death: she suspects the death was staged rather than real, something the official autopsy failed to detect. This sequence places the post-mortem examination at the narrative pivot of the episode.
The subject in depth
An autopsy is the systematic examination of a body after death, carried out to determine the cause, the circumstances, and, if necessary, the time of death [Wikipedia] . The physician or examiner proceeds in a set order, looking for signs that change predictably over the hours and days following death.
The main signs examined are as follows. Lividity (livor mortis) consists of bluish patches that appear on the body’s lower-lying areas, where blood pools under gravity once circulation stops. Their location and whether they shift can help estimate the body’s position at the time of death and whether it was moved afterward. Rigor mortis is a muscular stiffening that sets in a few hours after death, progressing from the face to the lower limbs before resolving in the same order. Its degree gives a rough estimate of the time of death. Stomach contents, examined during internal autopsy, indicate the nature and digestion of the last meal, which can point toward poisoning or help refine the time of death. Finally, external and internal injuries (bruises, ligature marks, hemorrhages, signs of strangulation) help distinguish a natural death from a violent one.
Forensic medicine as a codified discipline has particularly old roots in China
[Wikipedia] . In the 13th century, the magistrate and physician Song Ci (宋慈, 1186–1249) wrote the Xiyuan Jilu (洗冤集錄, literally “Collected Cases of Injustice Rectified”), a five-volume treatise describing in detail the techniques for examining a body, distinguishing types of wounds, telling drowning apart from strangulation, and methods for distinguishing natural death from murder. This manual is considered one of the world’s earliest works of forensic medicine. It was reprinted and annotated for centuries, and it stands as a direct ancestor of the practice the series depicts.
In Europe, the formalization of forensic medicine came later. The first systematic European treatises appear in the 16th and 17th centuries, with authors such as Ambroise Paré in France and Paolo Zacchia in Italy. Forensic medicine became fully established as an academic and judicial discipline there in the 19th century, several centuries after the Xiyuan Jilu.
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