The best teacher I had in High School taught us to view TV “news” critically. With only a half hour, minus commercials and sports, to provide the information we need to be responsible, informed citizens, they show us a building on fire. Unless you own or live in that building, that’s just not news.

ABC picked up a tabloid style “human interest” story from Venezuela about a man who reportedly “woke up” on the autopsy table. Now, let’s be generous and stipulate that although this can’t qualify as a real news story it’s at least odd and unusual enough that people will want to read it. That’s how it got linked on Drudge, after all.

My beef with ABC is that they accepted the story uncritically, without spending five minutes to reason it out and research.

Start with the scar on the guy’s face. Does that look like a scalpel incision to you? Looks to me more like a bicycle accident or a bar brawl. Second, doesn’t it seem fishy that an autopsy would start with an incision on the chin?

To keep you informed and appropriately skeptical, Buttle’s World did the research. It just so happens that we have a reader who has actually done autopsies. I told him I smelled a rat.

Note: If you’d rather not read the description of an autopsy, stop here. The executive summary is that they don’t start by cutting the face.

I smell one, too.

If there was a forensic reason to open the chin (such as to extract a bullet or examine the path of a wound), it might be done, but you’d do that after the main part of the autopsy.

Besides, a scalpel incision of the chin should not cause “excruciating” pain.

Routine autopsy procedure:

1) A Y-shaped incision, with each arm of the Y going up the chest, the the leg of the Y going down the abdomen.

The skin is peeled back, and the chest wall cut free (we used branch cutters).

All organs (including the trachea, larynx, and tongue, en bloc) are removed through this Y incision.

After the organs are weighed and samples taken for microscopic analysis, the remains are all poured back into the chest/abdomen cavity like a slurry, and the chest wall is wired back in place.

2) A U-shaped incision from ear to ear. The scalp is peeled back anterior and posteriorly, exposing the skull. The calvaria (skullcap) is sawed off so that the brain may be removed.

The brain is placed in formaldehyde for examination about a week later.

A morgue attendant* then sews up the incisions. Add a competent undertaker, and you can have an open-casket funeral without any tell-tale signs of an autopsy.

*The word Diener is German for servant. In English, it is used to describe the person, in the morgue, responsible for handling, moving, and cleaning the corpse. It is derived from the German word Leichendiener, which literally means corpse servant. Dieners are also referred to as morgue attendants.