Maceration Corpse

Maceration of a (soft) body/corpse (lat. maceratio lit. soaking, from lat. macero to chew) is a post-mortem phenomenon in forensic medicine, in which cellular detritus is formed due to absorption through the skin into the surrounding tissues or from the cavities of organs of tissue fluid, determining the specific color of corpse green: the corpse is greenish-brown in color, wrinkled on the surface, and when cut, greenish-white or green contents of the organs are revealed in the depths; at the same time, soft tissues acquire a certain hardness, elasticity and become unequal in density depending on the degree of development of maceration, which in some areas of the corpse reaches a significant degree. Maceration is one of the stages of autolysis of a corpse. Therefore, in the initial stage of maceration of a corpse, a forensic medical diagnosis cannot be made. The degree of maceration is also influenced by changing food and drink conditions; hence the macerates discovered during examination of the “wanderers” make it possible to judge some details of their biography. In judicial practice, there are cases when a corpse, for example, stolen from a refrigerator, is stored and can even be eaten by wild animals and birds: there is no maceration on such “corpses,” so the expert determines the time that has passed since death based on other signs of the corpse indicated in Diagozsson's classification. Body type and “body age”; features of the physique, skin, hair, moles and scars enable the expert in certain cases to roughly determine gender, age, profession, the presence of various diseases, some injuries and other details; the most characteristic features are described in the works of I. V. Bushman; all this information is important for criminal investigation.