In The Bird of Paradise, R. D. Laing described a surreal vignette from his student days: medical students at their dissecting tables erupting in spontaneous rebellion, chucking at one another bits of their subjects' anatomies, the air suddenly filled with organs and truncated limbs. The grisly frivolity ended with the arrival of the professor. He took in the scene in dreadful silence, then thundered an unanswerable question: 'How do you expect them to sort themselves out on the Day of Judgment?'

Presumably the incident is not typical of the anatomist's daily round, but neither is it altogether surprising. We speak of the terrible dignity of death, but there is something profoundly undignified about an eviscerated corpse. Man may be noble, but his dead body is just so much animal matter in a state of relative decay. The person who finds himself elbow-deep in human entrails is unavoidably subject to morbid thoughts and disturbing emotions – identification with a fellow mortal, contempt for the condition to which this other is reduced. And fear, and horror, and pity. All of which feelings may become so oppressive that they require explosive release.

A practising forensic pathologist necessarily overcomes these instinctive qualms. Between the