ABSTRACT
In modern practice, an autopsy is usually taken to indicate a detailed examination that includes the external examination of the corpse, and the evisceration and subsequent careful dissection of the contents of the cranial, thoracic, abdominal and pelvic cavities. This chapter considers that there are two principal types of autopsy: hospital examinations, performed on the request of a clinician with the consent of the next of kin, and medicolegal autopsies. In the early medieval west, dissection of the human cadaver remained closely bound up with the religious beliefs of the time. The performance of incomplete dissections, the failure to correlate morphological with clinical findings, and the brevity of reports continued to hamper the autopsy through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The autopsy and the anatomical dissection became sources of human tissue for archiving and display. The history of the autopsy examination in its modern form begins in Padua in the mid-eighteenth century with the work of Giovanni Battista Morgagni.
