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Thursday, November 19, 2009

Autopsy

The first autopsy done in Hong Kong was on a woman named Nga Lok Po who died suddenly causing her relatives to suspect she had been poisoned. The inquest was held on August 15, 1842 and Dr Lunn, Hong Kong's first pathologist, identified cause of death as a 'visitation of God'.

When I saw "visitation of God" listed as the official cause of death, my first reaction was to laugh hysterically, but a little research soon told me that the unusual cause of death wasn't quite as unique as I first thought. It was actually very common in the middle of the nineteenth century to attribute sudden unexplained deaths in this way - basically a fancy way of saying "natural causes." But, Dr. Lunn might have a hard time explaining that his God wasn't the “God of Death”.

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