Career Day

PROFESSION: PATHOLOGIST

What is the grossest? A leper? A dead rabbit with flies swarming in its entrails maybe? How about your parents having sex? That’s nothing. Check out what 24 year-old Paul McRae sees everyday  doing prep-work and assisting with autopsies in a coroner’s office.

VICE: What is the grossest thing that you have ever seen?
Paul McRae: I still, to this day, have a problem with burn victims. I’ve seen human beings burned completely beyond recognition. You couldn’t tell if they were male or female.

How does that smell?
Umm, the morgue is three floors below street level and when I go through the main entrance on the first floor, I can tell if we have a burn victim that day.

How many bodies do you do in a week?
Depends on the week. Today was a pretty average day and I assisted on about ten autopsies. We had to look for blood clots on the brain of one of the cases today.

Does that mean you cut that person’s skull open?
Yeah, the top of it.

Did you man the saw?
Yeah.

Do you think differently about what it means to be alive?
You have to put it all aside. You can’t look at it as a living human being, because it’s not. You have to disassociate a soul from a body and that is what we do. You can’t go in there thinking of the body as a living human being. It’s just too traumatic. You see a lot of young children. You see a lot of young women in terrible situations. You see victims of rape. You can’t really let yourself get compassionate about it. You just have to look at it as your job. You have to look at it no differently than people working in a slaughterhouse or something like that. They eat beef but they don’t think about the day they spent on the kill floor when they sit down to a steak dinner.

Why do you do it?
I find it fascinating. When I first decided to enter into the medical field, I met a gentleman who was a coroner at the time. I went on a tour of the facility that I work at now, and on the wall I saw the coroner’s motto, which is “We learn from the dead to protect the living.” Without us, so many things would be left unsolved. The very first doctors were thought of as witches because they used to rob graves. That is how they learned. You learn everything from the dead.



Do you ever get bodies arriving in bags?
Sure. You get car accidents where people are dismembered. It is basically the job of the rescue crew to salvage as much of that body as possible. You still want to check blood alcohol level and stuff like that. Every time someone dies the coroner has to pronounce them dead, whether you die in the hospital or in a car accident. It is a busy job. Everybody dies.

What is the worst thing that you’ve seen?
I’ve done exhumations to do autopsies.

How far were they decomposed?
I have seen them after ten years. All you have there is deposits. I’ve seen them after two weeks, three weeks, a month. Rigor Mortis is at its final stages. You lose all the parasites after that because there is not much for them to live on.

You’ve seen bodies loaded with maggots?
Oh yeah. Absolutely. The way that I look at these things is that it is a clock. After a certain stage this happens. It’s a time measurement for us.

How many dead bodies have you seen?
About 2,000 maybe.

Do you see subway jumpers?
Every week.

What does the human body look like after it is hit by a subway train?
Hamburger. It depends if they got caught under the wheels or not. The cause of death, in that case, is massive trauma. That is a pretty big blow. They die instantly.

That must be a pretty intense way to go.
Not really, I saw a medical journal the other day where a guy was high on PCP and he cut his face off with a piece of broken glass and fed it to his dog.

Are you scared of death?
Not anymore. It is inevitable. It is the only thing that is for sure in life. When I go I just hope that I have a good time.