All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

by Sue Black

I feel a heightened sense of anxiety when he talks this way, but I also know that there is nothing I can do to dissuade him, because we have had these conversations many, many times. I will not aid him but I cannot stop him – that is not my right, nor is it an option he gives me. I count it a privilege that he feels he can talk to me and I will not interfere, just allow him to rehearse his rhetoric, testing how comfortable and reasonable it sounds, to both himself and others.

He has given me a code word only he and I know, which he says he will leave on the answering machine in my office over a weekend so that it is waiting for me on the Monday morning. This will be the signal for me to alert the necessary authorities so that they can begin to arrange for his wishes to be followed.

It is, in an odd way, a kindness, but it has led to me developing a very healthy antipathy to the flashing red message light on my phone, especially on Monday mornings.

my hope is, of course, that when the time comes he will experience a peaceful, swift and natural end that both accommodates his wishes and allays society’s current fears and restrictions.

how grateful I feel

for sharing his most personal wishes with me, but I also feel a tremendous weight of responsibility for ensuring that they are respected while all legal requirements are upheld. The moral conundrums are heavier still.

Can I stop him? Should I stop him?

by the time he has done it, it will be too late for me to intervene. So all I can realistically do is to keep talking to him.

asking the questions I am at least prompting him to continually reassess his decision.

Quite some time ago now he asked if he could look at our dissecting room and watch some dissection. I gasped. Never before had we had a bequeather requesting to see what goes on in our dissecting room.

I, on the other hand, was inexplicably and massively conflicted.

When prospective students come to visit the university, they are permitted to view the dissecting room, so why not prospective donors, who are, after all, the other half of this symbiotic relationship?

I was afraid it might frighten or disturb him.

I was told politely but firmly that he wanted to do this with me because he knew and trusted me, but if I wasn’t comfortable with it, he completely understood. He would go to another department and ask them. Such a little blackmailer!

He commented that seeing how delicate some of these structures were made him realise just how fragile life is.

I don’t know who was more scared – the students, Arthur or me. I still had no clue how this was going to turn out.

It is amazing how, as if on some unspoken command, the entire atmosphere in a room can change in a split second.

We see this all the time in mortuaries, where there is an unwritten rule that when a stranger enters, you adjust your conduct and demeanour until you have a good idea of who they are and what they are doing there.

I stepped back and watched the most amazing miracle unfold in front of my eyes: Arthur and the students, far from being separated by death, becoming united by it through the glorious world of anatomy.

The chatter level in the room began to rise again as he was accepted into the circle.

They had been really afraid of offending him or upsetting him. But they understood the importance of what they had done for him and, indeed, what he had done for them, and would do for future students.

Yet I find it apt and comforting that we will die together, I in my body and she in my mind.

So responsibility for treating archaeological remains with decency and dignity, and observing the sanctity of the need to leave a body at peace, must extend beyond the memories of our own lifespans.

we decided to take a closer look at a teaching skeleton that was hanging in their science laboratory. By the end of the day, once they knew they were actually face to face with a young man, no older than most of them, who was 5ft 4ins tall, had anaemia through poor diet and had probably come from India, they saw this skeleton in an entirely different light. They were no longer happy about him being put back in a cupboard and wanted him to be treated with greater respect.

the power of forensic anthropology that it can reinstate identity and rekindle the human instinct to care and protect.

so there was no way I was going to spend my research time with corpses of dead rodents.

might like to consider identification from human bone for the purposes of forensic anthropology. Brilliant – no fur, tails or claws.

Because they were often buried in sand, the preservation of the remains was excellent and they formed a marvellous study collection for my research project.

Dusty, warm and smelling of wood and resin, they reminded me of my father’s carpentry workshop.

As our islands have been inhabited for more than 12,000 years, it is inevitable that the working life of every forensic anthropologist will be crossed by archaeological material on a fairly frequent basis.

Five traditional and accepted ways of dealing with them have been used by humankind around the world across the ages. First, they can be left exposed in the open for terrestrial and airborne scavengers to remove, the method still employed in the sky burials of Tibet. Secondly, they can be deposited in rivers or into the sea, where aquatic life will fulfil the same purpose. Thirdly, we may store our dead above ground, via immurement in mausoleums and the like, which has often been the preferred option of the wealthy. The fourth solution is to bury them in the ground, where the invertebrates of the soil will take on the scavenging processes. With the appropriate permission, we can technically bury a body anywhere we like, including on private land, as long as there is no risk of contamination of water sources. Lastly, we can burn them, which is currently seen as the quickest and most hygienic choice, though it does raise concerns about air pollution.

The rationale was that if death came upon somebody suddenly, their spirit could remain trapped within their corpse for long enough to bring vital benefits to those who chose to consume it.

A Franciscan apothecary from 1679 even gives us a recipe for human blood jam.

With the mass migration to cities brought by the Industrial Revolution, we began to run out of burial space and the Victorian era saw the construction of municipal cemeteries,

the reuse of graves had been common but as the cemeteries began to fill up, the eviction of some of their tenants rather more swiftly than was felt to be decent often led to public outrage.

except when official exhumations were ordered. Interestingly, it was only opening a grave that constituted an offence. It was not against the law to actually ...

Local Authorities Act in London, where the space problem is most acute, paved the way for boroughs to exhume remains and place them in smaller containers before reburying them, as long as the grave is at least seventy-five years old and there are no objections from leaseholders or relatives.

Grave reuse remains an emotive issue and raises religious, cultural and ethical concerns.

Durban, South Africa and Sydney, Australia, for example, have, like London, encountered strong cultural resistance to plans to introduce new legislation.

routinely removing bones from the ground or vaults and transferring them to vast underground catacombs or ossuaries, where the artistic skills of the custodian were given free rein.

In 1870 a wood-carver named Frantisek Rint was given the job of sorting out the accumulated heaps and began to transform the bones of between 40,000 and 70,000 people into outrageously elaborate decorations and furnishings for the chapel.

But burial, of whatever duration and whether in the ground or within monuments, is falling out of favour.

polluting effects.

they are no happier about cremation. Every cremation uses the equivalent of about 16 gallons of fuel and increases the global emission of mercury, dioxins and furans (a toxic compound).

Modern society likes to keep pushing the boundaries and newer ‘greener’ options are starting to emerge (cremated ashes are pretty much devoid of major nutrients).

‘resomation’, which involves alkaline hydrolysis. The body is placed into a vat with water and lye (caustic soda or sodium hydroxide) and heated to 160°C under high pressure for about three hours. This breaks down the body tissues into a greenish-brown liquid, rich in amino acids, peptides and salts. The remaining brittle bones are reduced to powder (principally calcium hydroxyapatite) by a cremulator and can then be scattered or used as fertiliser.

‘human composting’,

If such modern methods become the norm, fewer of us will leave behind as many traces of our physical selves as our ancestors did.

Skeletal and other remains have enriched human history by giving archaeologists and anthropologists the voyeuristic luxury and academic stimulation of being able to study the people of former cultures at an up-close and very personal level.

But all the stories we covered carried a reminder of just how far the dead, even from a very long time ago, can reach beyond their graves to touch us today.