2017/03/21

Popular Science March 17, 2017: Some corpses may mysteriously heat up after death, A strange case-study from the Czech Republic

One morning, in a hospital in the Czech Republic, a 69-year-old man died of heart disease. An hour later, as nurses were preparing to move his body down to the lab for autopsy, they noticed his skin was unusually warm. After calling the doctor back to make sure the man was really dead (he was), they took his temperature. At 1.5 hours after death, the body was 104 degrees Fahrenheit—about five degrees hotter than it was before he died, even though the hospital room was kept at about 68 degrees.

Fearing the body might spontaneously combust, the doctor and nurses took pains to cool it with ice packs, and eventually it got as chilly as one would expect of a corpse. This interesting case-study is published in the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, and in fact has nothing to do with spontaneous combustion.

“Post-mortem hyperthermia is a well-documented phenomenon, but it's not well understood," says Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist at George Washington University. Although it's mentioned in forensic science textbooks, “It's not necessarily known by a lot of people.”

In a living body, cells generate heat as they break down food, usually keeping the body temperature around a comfortable 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. After death, with no food and no oxygen to digest it with, cells generally stop producing heat, and the body cools down at a fairly predictable rate over several hours. Investigators commonly use body temperature to estimate how long it's been since a person died—which can be essential in solving a murder, for example.

Unfortunately, the relationship between body temperature and time may not always be so straightforward. more