An autopsy of a deceased person is performed in order to find out what post-mortem changes have occurred in the body and what is the cause of the death of this person. Usually an autopsy is of two types: forensic and pathoanatomical.

Pathoanatomical autopsy is performed in those people who died in hospital from serious illnesses. That is, the cause of death is most likely to be expected, based on data on the course of the disease, so this death is natural. The forensic autopsy is done by order of the relevant authorities, for example the police, in order to establish the following important facts that can establish whether death was natural or violent. In this type of autopsy, forensic doctors can establish:

• the cause and time of death;

• presence of additional bodily injuries that did not cause death, but are aggravating in the course of the case;

• whether some damage was caused during the life of the deceased, or it was done after the death of a person;

• prescription and sequence of transformations in the body;

• the method of causing harm and the mechanism of action;

• establishing the most probable cause of death.

Typically, such studies are conducted for people who have been forcibly killed and who died suddenly. A forensic autopsy can also be done when relatives complain of improper treatment of the patient, which presumably resulted in death. Regardless of all the causes and circumstances, corpses of persons without a definite place of residence are opened, an autopsy is carried out and the corpses are inspected, which are dismembered. An autopsy is performed by special medical personnel - forensic medical experts, who can provide qualified assistance, especially when working with police authorities. If there are no such doctors( for example, it is impossible to transport a corpse to a morgue), then any doctor can perform an autopsy.

Autopsy involves several stages. The first stage is a visual examination of the body that came to the examination. Doctors examine the corpse, clothes in detail, establish the integrity of clothing, the presence of other objects on it or on the body. Further, the corpse in the morgue is undressed and begins to examine the skin and the body as a whole. Determine if there is damage to the body and if so, where they are. Describe the location and nature of cadaveric spots, which indicates the prescription of the onset of death. Further, soft tissues and internal organs are examined. In the forensic autopsy, corpses are not washed, so as not to lose important clues. If there is a suspicion of the nature of death, the forensic medical expert may prescribe additional tests to more accurately establish the cause of death. Special work is the autopsy of the child's corpse. Here it is important for the doctor to determine whether the child was alive at birth, whether he was born alive, or died in the womb, how mature his organs, how much he lived after birth, whether there were attempts to care for the child. Usually viable, live-born babies are considered to be those children, whose mass is more than one and a half kilograms, they have a body length of about forty centimeters, in their organs there are no pathologies of intrauterine development that could lead to death. In addition, samples of lungs and stomach are taken - if parts of these organs float on the water, then the child was born alive and breathing. The autopsy of the child's corpse is especially important, as when the mother is brought to justice, she will be sentenced on the basis of this particular procedure. The entire course of the autopsy is described in detail in a special form, there is also a graph of the final conclusion and the establishment of the causes of death. After the opening, the relevant papers are given to the relatives of the deceased.