A Case of Need

by Michael Crichton

After my initial harsh experience with cadavers, I was surprised to find I was interested in pathology. I like the work and have learned to push from my mind the smells and the sight of each new corpse, each new postmortem. But somehow autopsies are different, in some strange sense more hopeful. At autopsy you are dealing with a man, newly dead, and you know his story. He is not a faceless, anonymous cadaver but a person who had recently waged a very private battle, the only private battle in life, and lost. Your job is to find out how, and why, he lost, in order to help others who will soon do battle—and yourself. It is a far cry from the dissection cadavers, which exist in a kind of sickening, professional death, as if their only