This is one of the first years in like ever that I actually managed to read a bit more in the evenings versus only doomscrolling on my phone. And yes, ditching a bit of Hive has also helped in this. It means sometimes you have to put away a device to get some room in your life for other stuff.
So I went on reading a lot of pulp books that were nice chickflicks and romans with just nothing special in the timeline but the ordinary. Introduction of character, problem arrises, main character has a hard time. But just when you think it all will not turn out well anymore, it ends up turning out all well again.
Nothing to write home about actually. So when recently the book 'Post Mortem' was released from my favorite Dutch forensic pathologist, I think I bought it on the second day or something. Now this dude called Frank van der Goot is a known character in high profile cases where out of the box expertise is requiered.
I went to a work related lecture from him a couple of years ago and listened breathless to the man for about an hour because the stories he was telling, they caught me in the second. And this is kind of weird to be intrigued by stories of the dead because being a health care worker is all about working on the living.
Giving lectures isn't easy and especially to tell stuff in a kind of funny way when all you are talking about is dead people and in what kind of weird ways their life has ended. Normally this wouldn't be such a fun topic, but listening to this guy it was literally stories of facts and not emotions attached to it.
On to the book!
The book itself just involves a lot of different examples on what Frank has encountered throughout he career on the dead. What for me is interesting to realize is the thin line between what forensics do and what kind of conclusions can be drawn from that for potential convictions.
As in...what he usually does is give an advice on what is possible on a potential death cause based on the facts that are realistic. But that almost never means that the true facts about the cause of death are known. The cause of death is always a heart that stops beating, but there are various reasons why this eventually happens.
Life, being old, coincidence, being struck by lightning, falling from a building, it all passes by in examples throughout the whole career of Frank.
And the most typical thing is about his business. There is hardly any known literature to fall back on. Now literature and studies are like the backbone of all modern medicine, but in a field like this....you can't really experiment on how people die and what the impact is by experimenting on it, right?
As in...how much impact had on the body when you walk into a pair of garden scissors for instance. So Frank replicated these kinds of situation like events himself to see if something is possible or not, and that to me is being a pioneer in medicine..even though it is in a very different kind of way.
I was more than enterained the whole time throughout reading this book, while every one around me was a bit like 'what are you reading and laughing again around this gory book? You are weird'.
Since the book has just been released last week for now it is only in Dutch but I really hope that this gets translated and others can also enjoy these stories about the dead.
Because...all stories deserve to be told!