very year American dictionaries add new words that have become so common that they are considered mainstream. In the area of medicolegal death investigation, “virtopsy” is trending in that direction. Most of us who work in the areas of forensic medicine and forensic toxicology have heard of the virtual autopsy—an autopsy based more on imaging than physical examination—for which the alias virtop...

We report the autopsy of a stillborn fetus with congenital hyperthyroidism born to a mother with untreated Graves' disease, whose cause of death was congestive heart failure. The major findings concerned the skull, thyroid, heart, and placenta. The cranial sutures were closed, with overlapping skull bones. The thyroid was increased in volume and had intense blood congestion. Histological examin...

Careful study of reports prepared for the Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Deaths in England and Wales has made it clear that many maternal autopsy reports are not as informative as they might be. This is, in part at least, because no pathologist who does not work in a maternity unit can expect to see more than a handful of such deaths in a working lifetime. This paper describes briefly the...