BioMed
Sue Black explains how forensic anthropology identifies human remains across criminal cases, war crimes and disasters while reflecting on mortality and professional responsibility.
People who work daily with decay, dismemberment and violent death can cope by sealing each kind of horror into its own mental room. Inside the room they act as an inert observer, a kind of analytical automaton, while the real self stays outside it, protected from the sensory onslaught. Detachment here is a deliberate technique. It is not coldness.
If you cannot influence an outcome, worrying about it only wastes time you will never get back. Death is the clearest case. Whatever choices we make, the final destination is fixed and the same for everyone, so dreading it gains nothing.
A skeleton records a person's history, and an expert can read it to help put a name to unknown remains. The basic profile is built from age, sex, ancestry and height. The body also keeps odder records: tattoo ink, for example, slowly drains into the lymph nodes.
After a mass disaster, identifying victims cannot be left to a few specialists. It needs a standing, ready response unit and forensic training spread across several professions. Police officers can be taught mortuary practice so that they work alongside scientists.
Handling the dead clinically and treating them with reverence are compatible. The best practitioners manage both, much as one cares for people in one's keeping. That reverence extends especially to people who donate their bodies so that others can learn anatomy.
To someone who works with them, the dead are predictable and co-operative. The real danger comes from the living. Fear of corpses is misplaced, and the harm we should watch for comes from people who are still alive.
A child's skeleton changes in a predictable order as it grows, so its age can be estimated closely. Once growth stops, those markers are gone, and an adult's age can only be judged far more loosely. The confidence of an identification therefore depends on what stage of life the bones come from.
A skeleton can point to biological sex. It cannot reveal how the person lived or understood their own identity. Investigators have to keep these two separate when they build a profile of someone they are trying to name.
Long familiarity with death can turn dread into calm acceptance, even fondness. Death comes to seem an interesting, almost gracious process, and can be pictured as a companion rather than an enemy. Facing it this directly turns attention back toward how to live.