Title: Unnatural Causes
Author: Richard Shepherd
Type: Non-fiction
Published: 2018
Pages: 442
“The meeting introduced me- or, perhaps no introduction was necessary- to the awful collision between the silent, unfeeling dead and immensity of feeling they generate in the living. I left the room with relief, making a mental note to avoid the bereaved at all costs and stick to the safe world inhabited by the dead, with its facts, its measurements, its certainties. In their universe, there was a complete absence of emotion. Not to mention its ugly sister, pain.”
For fans of: This is Going to Hurt, The Prison Doctor
Having read Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt last year, I found the medical non-fiction genre suddenly very fascinating! This book came onto my radar when I saw it in a Waterstone’s last year. After Christmas (and armed with a voucher) I decided to get it! This book-cum-memoir follows the career of Dr Richard Shepherd, a pathologist who has worked on hundreds of autopsies over the years, trying to discover how they died and if there were any unnatural causes behind it.
What was so fascinating about this book was the sheer amount you can learn from a dead body, not just about how they died, but how they lived their life, and the physical impact that had. Shepherd didn’t shy away from the gory details, but he did it in a way that was easy to understand and consume, even if as a reader you have no medical background.
It was also really intruiging that he had worked on, or was involved with many cases I had heard of including the death of Princess Diana and the 9/11 attacks. Seeing these from his and other medical professionals point of view gave them a whole new kind of perspective.
I loved how he tried to decipher from each case not only what happened, but why and what that says about us as a species. Dying from natural causes is, for the most part, unpreventable, but it is truly shocking how many people choose to take the life of another, and also, the people who are forced into that situation as well. His commentary on this, along with the flaws in our justice system, made this book all the more captivating.
All in all, this book is an interesting read for anyone with a penchant for this kind of field, or for people who want an insight into this often not pried upon world. To say it was eye-opening is an understatement and it’s no wonder that Shepherd’s work had such an impact on his personal life and mental health given the horrors he had witnessed at murder scenes, massacres, and in his morgue.
Review overview
Summary
8.9Fascinating, Educational, Life-affirming