EDKH

storytime:
Long but worth it, I hope.

Back in the 80’s I was dating this girl, and her friend was getting married which is how i got invited to a party and met the brides Dad, the chief coroner for British Columbia Canada.
Being a few years older than the rest I gravitated to the Dad and we eventually abandoned the party in favor of whiskey and snooker inside.

This is were he told me some of the most amazing things I have ever heard.

First I had asked him to tell me something funny about being a coroner.
Well, he began, did you know that motors and generators are the same machine?
If you put power into a motor it turns, and if you turn a generator power comes out, but you _CAN_ turn a motor and get power out…the same with the human body.
So , he says, I teach first year students anatomy and I play this little joke on them every semester, first I get them comfortable with the corpse we will be dissecting by pointing out every single feature on the human body , this involves lifting arms and legs and rolling it over and siting it up and down quite a few times for each of them.
Unbeknownst to them this actually causes a build up of power in the body.
Once we get the body positively humming with electricity..
We move on to the “y” incision, where we slice open the torso and reflect the flesh open to expose the internal organs.
We scoop some aside and I ask “where is this specific nerve?”
Now,I know that every class has an asskisser who has read really far ahead and is desperate to impress me, so I hand that person the scalpel and Instruct them to point out the “specific nerve”
When they reach into the cavity and touch the nerve with the scalpel it allows the electrical impulse to jump to the stomach muscles in the corpse and it will,
quite suddenly,
clench,
and sit up.
The guts will pile out on its lap and trapped gasses in the stomach will rattle up the throat causing the larynx to vibrate so the body makes a very distinctly human moaning noise .
This creates a blast pattern of passed out white coated students all around the dissection table , from above , it would look like a daisy.
Well, we laughed about this for quite some time, and feeling we had created a connection I dared to ask,
Can you tell me something about being a coroner that nobody knows about?
(I was expecting some necrophiliacs or cannibalism stories, but got this..)

His mood darkened a bit as he poured himself another whiskey.
Well, …he began.. you know how those religious types are always going on about how the eye is a miracle,.. and don’t get me wrong, it is.
But it is also extremely simplex, it works exactly the same as your skin getting a tan, the pain from a sunburn could be interpreted as “seeing”.
The millions of rods and cones in your eye “tan” 60 times a second, they pause to send an electrical impulse and then a chemical comes and resets the “tan”.
But make no mistake, the. Eye. Tans.
If you slice open the eye of a corpse you will see the last thing they saw tattooed onto the back of the eye.
The chemical didn’t come to wipe it away.
Here’s the secret part.
Killers love to watch the victim die.
They look them right in the eyes.
And the eye would “photograph”them.
We used to bring in police artists to draw the killers face if we found one in the eye but now I do the identikits thing.
Too many loose lips among the artist types.
See, that’s why it is a secret.
This is how the majority of murders actually get solved, the eye is the last witness.
But we can’t use it in open court because if we did, word would get out and every single murder victim would have missing eyes.
Which is how we suspect that Dr.gull was Jack the Ripper. He would have known, and none of his victims had useable eyes.
Thats how I know for a fact that (redacted) didn’t kill (redacted) because I did the autopsy. (Still an open case)
I have seen who actually killed her.

Needles to say I was a bit floored.

A couple of years later I bought a book on the life of Leonardo da Vinci illustrated by Ralph steadman, in it was a chapter detailing how Leonardo was able to accurately depict running water. (Think about how hard it would be to picture one moment of rushing swirling water in a stream)
Well, it turns out , da Vinci would lock a goats head in a pillick an then bash it’s brains in.
Scoop out it’s eye and cook it gently in an egg white (As a stiffener)
Slice it open on draw the last thing the goat saw..the water.

Anyway, I remembered this story last night and I just wanted to get it out there.
I’ll that I told you is true
But I can’t prove it is a fact.
Your pal
Scott.