{"id":4781,"date":"2016-03-05T00:00:15","date_gmt":"2016-03-05T08:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/?p=4781"},"modified":"2016-03-04T21:18:44","modified_gmt":"2016-03-05T05:18:44","slug":"book-review-working-stiff-by-judy-melinek-and-t-j-mitchell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/?p=4781","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: &#8220;Working Stiff&#8221; by Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/llEC9XYGRWE\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Dr. Judy Melinek described her experience as a medical examiner performing autopsy on nearly 300 bodies in New York. She shared some personal experience as a daughter to a psychiatrist father, who committed suicide when she was only 13 years old. You can learn from her a few ways how a person dies and what happens afterward. Of course, you get to learn the forensic science on how to determine how a person dies and how to attribute to the root cause. As a person who&#8217;s always curious about deaths (one of my favorite HBO TV series is &#8220;Six Feet Under&#8221;), it&#8217;s a very fascinating read if you&#8217;re interested in that sort of things.<br \/>\n&#8211; The main reason Dr. Melinek decided to switch from being a surgeon to a forensic pathologist or medical examiner was to leave the 130-hr work week, which may result in hurting her patients. She couldn&#8217;t do it any more.<br \/>\n&#8211; &#8220;Decomps&#8221; or decomposition of human bodies when a person dies &#8211; the blow up of skin due to bacteria, the maggots, and etc., challenges a medical examiner in finding the cause of death.<br \/>\n&#8211; Dr. Melinek examined many suicide cases. Having experienced her father&#8217;s suicide, it gets very personal for her but she was willing to talk about it and confronting it, which is in a way therapeutic for her. I agreed that the committing suicide is a coward act but I sympathize without those suffering through depression and the family members who had to see the self destruction of their loved one.<br \/>\n&#8211; She distinguished the differences among the causes of death: &#8220;undetermined,&#8221; &#8220;homicide,&#8221; &#8220;accident,&#8221; &#8220;therapeutic altercation&#8221; and &#8220;natural cause.&#8221; The responsibility lies with the examiner in determining the cause correctly.<br \/>\n&#8211; A medical examiner doesn&#8217;t get to follow through the cases that came to their tables. When ruled as &#8220;homicide,&#8221; a detective must investigate. The frustrating one is one that she couldn&#8217;t find the cause &#8211; &#8220;undetermined.&#8221;<br \/>\n&#8211; Strange cases like headless man washed out on a river bank who turned out be a handicap with a serious gambling habit. Nonhuman parts like animal penis showed up for ID. There was a body without much blood &#8211; retracted back to the bone?! A bullet got flushed into the circulatory system and ended up far away from the entry point. An alcoholic woman fell off the stair and died &#8211; killed by her estranged husband? A hot-watered burned baby? A strange TRALI case, anti-body reaction to blood transfusion, was mistaken to be a drug junkie case.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; Working through the disaster of the World Trade Center collapses during September 11, 2001, Melinek had the first-hand knowledge of that human tragedy and the experience working through identifying the body parts for the living who remains. The gruesome scenes that she describes make a deep impression on me &#8211; the charred, decomposed body parts that they had to identify for almost 1,400 people out of the nearly 3,000 casualties. What a sad, sad tragedy! In addition, they had to contend with the threat of anthrax, the subsequent <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/American_Airlines_Flight_587\">crash of AA 587<\/a> in Queens, NY within 2 months of the 911 and other rumors that made their work more difficult.<br \/>\n&#8211; I like this last quote of hers, &#8220;To confront death every day (she did more than 2,000 since), to see it for yourself, you have to love the living.&#8221; How true!<\/p>\n<p><iframe<\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dr. Judy Melinek described her experience as a medical examiner performing autopsy on nearly 300 bodies in New York. She shared some personal experience as a daughter to a psychiatrist father, who committed suicide when she was only 13 years old. You can learn from her a few ways how a person dies and what &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/?p=4781\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Book Review: &#8220;Working Stiff&#8221; by Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4791,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4781"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4790,"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4781\/revisions\/4790"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learnbyblogging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}