Cause of Death: Forensic Files of a Medical Examiner [Hardcover]

Stephen D. Cohle (Author), Tobin T. Buhk (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 27, 2007

The body of a woman floats to the surface of a lake with sixty pounds of cinder block and chain attached to her legs. Her killer faces the death penalty if the prosecution can answer one question: Did she drown? A worker for the only US plant licensed to produce anthrax dies, the victim of a heart attack. But what caused his heart to stop beating? Follow veteran medical examiner Dr Stephen D Cohle into the world of forensic pathology, as he solves these and many other cases. Written from an insider's view, "Cause of Death" puts the reader behind Dr Cohle's shoulder while he examines each victim. The cases range from exotic murder mysteries ripe for a CSI episode to everyday casualties of heart attacks and car accidents. Every victim, though, has a story to tell.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Stephen D. Cohle, MD (Grand Rapids, MI), a nationally recognized figure in the community of forensic medicine, is the chief medical examiner for Kent County, Michigan, and a forensic pathologist for Laboratory Pathologists, PC. He is the author (with R. Byard) of Sudden Death in Infancy, Childhood, and Adolescence.

Tobin T. Buhk (Grand Rapids, MI) is a high school teacher and freelance writer. In preparation for writing this book, he observed and assisted Dr. Cohle and his forensic team in more than thirty autopsies.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 338 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books; 1 edition (February 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591024471
• ISBN-13: 978-1591024477
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #932,442 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars True Life Crime, June 10, 2007

By 

A.F.o.T (Ada, MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cause of Death: Forensic Files of a Medical Examiner (Hardcover)

Never having watched CSI, I was curious about why the daily goings-on of a medical examiner would merit a book. I did not have to read far to realize that this was fascinating stuff! Cause of Death demystifies what happens behind doors that no one ever wants to go through, but all enevitably will.
Dr. Cohle and Mr. Buhk allow the reader to see and smell the county morgue from an "over-the-shoulder" view. The authors present a perspective that preserves the sanctity of life, but damns some of life's behaviors and actions. The book does not sensationalize the macabre and sometimes horrible circumstances and details of death; it does reveal the bizarre, the terrible, and sometimes humorously ironic details that man (and woman)does to himself or others.
The writing style of the book allows the reader to learn more about individual victim cases. The reader can go along for the victim's last car ride all the way to the victim's last gurney ride; The reader can get a taste of the victim's last choice of poisen or the authors' last choice of music; the reader can experience how interminably long ten seconds is when a baby is being shaken by an angry father; and the reader can sense that the cause of death is not a television show to be wrapped up during a sixty minute time slot.
Great read!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An Honest Look at Working in a Morgue, May 25, 2007

By 

Stephen Mccaskill "www.crimesceneblog.com" (South Carolina) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cause of Death: Forensic Files of a Medical Examiner (Hardcover)

Stephen D. Cohle, MD is the chief medial examiner for Kent County, Michigan. During his years as the medical examiner, he has performed thousands of autopsies. Some have been part of high-profile murder cases, but the majority are not fodder for the next episode of CSI but are instead of just men and women, and sometimes children, who met their end through normal, though still heart-breaking means.

Cause of Death is told from the perspective of the medical examiner, but is unique from some of the other books by well known forensic pathologists. This volume does not highlight sensational cases, like the Jon Benet Ramsey case, but are instead full of what are just regular folks who happened to find their way to the morgue in various ways. It also gives the reader more of a sense of what a real medical examiner's office is like. There are no exhibits of murder weapons from famous cases, but there is a display of alcohol, delivered with some of the bodies who so often meet their demise as a result of the contents of these bottles.

Along for the trip, and co-authoring the book, is Tobin T. Buhk, who once told Cohle that he should write a book about his experiences. Buhk joined him in the morgue over the course of several months, and was able to witness and sometimes participate, in the autopsies of several people. This gives the authors the chance to bring the reader into the stories as more than just a casual observer. We are able to experience the operations of the morgue through the eyes of the expert, Dr. Cohle, and the novice, Buhk.

The Kent County morgue is not what you see on CSI or Law and Order. It is a place that is a collection of contradictions. The bodies that are brought into the room are treated with the reverance and professionalism we would all hope they would. But contrasted with this is a constant-changing soundtrack which varies from Los Lobos to Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Music is always playing during the autopsies, sometimes providing a counterpoint to the tragedy before them.

Along with the surgical gowns, latex gloves, and face guards, humor is another prophylactic used in the morgue. It is brought in to protect, not against disease, but the melancholy that comes from spending day after day determining the various manners in which humans find to end one another's or their own lives. And Tobin discovers, after just a few trips to the morgue, that sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying.

Each chapter contains one or two cases that came through the Kent County Medical Examiner's Office. Each contains a description of the case and the methods used by Dr. Cohle to determine, if possible, the cause of death. Unlike television, it is not an immediate process, done in moments. It sometimes takes hours to perform a complete autopsy, and even then it may be days before toxicology reports confirm the cause of death. This is truth of working in a morgue.

The book gives an honest account of what it really is like to work in a morgue. All of the sounds, smells, and there are a lot of smells, that make up the work of the medical examiner. If you ever thought it was glamorous to work in a morgue, take a glance through this book and you will qickly realize, it requires a high degree of training, long hours, and a willingness to look at the worst of humanity day after day. Kind, gentle people are not the majority of the traffic at the morgue, and even when they are, many times they arrived due to the actions of someone not so kind or gentle.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not Very Well-Written, December 1, 2009

By 

R. Schultz (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cause of Death: Forensic Files of a Medical Examiner (Hardcover)

There is some interesting information here about the revelations made possible by properly performed autopsies - but that information often gets obscured in a haze of purple prose and blanketing attempts at poetic effect.

For example, Cohle and his co-author start by deploring how TV depictions of forensics "clog the arteries like plaque." Then when describing his co-author's distress at realizing he might have been exposed to Hepatitis B in the process of observing an autopsy, Cohle says that a stone began to pitch "in the acids washing against his stomach like waves crashing on a beach." He attributes poetic meaning to the fact that it was raining outside when he started an autopsy by saying this rain was like a writer (perhaps Edgar Allen Poe?) "setting a scene."

Also, Cohle (or his co-author) surprisingly mix up the words supine (lying on one's back) and prone (lying on one's stomach). That would ordinarily be a minor quibble, but the exact position of a dead body can be crucial to discovering who or what caused the death, and so the distinction is something anyone involved in forensics should know.

Then the authors glance off into the irritatingly irrelevant when they describe what piece of music Cohle has playing in accompaniment to each autopsy.

The authors do achieve some apt passages. For example, they credit alcoholic beverages with the ability to "resurrect what should be resurrected and bury what should be buried; they make jokes sound funnier and bill collectors irrelevant; they bring out the humor in things & suppress the stress that often envelops adult life."

But then the co-authors lapse back into over-reaching for poetic import when they philosophize, "In mathematics, parallel lines never meet, but in human society, they do. While they did not live parallel lives, Marvell Green & Jim Michaels died parallel deaths." I kept wondering what constituted the railroad tracks of these men's deaths - until I finally realized it was merely the fact that both men's bodies ended up in the same hospital.

So if you want to read about the science of forensics, on a dark and stormy night, with the wind howling outside your door like the banshee escape of the last breath of a dying man - this might be the book for you.