If you've ever watched CSI, you know that the job of a pathologist can be just as important and interesting as being a hotshot detective. Official U.S. government statistics claim that there were 21,292 pathologists in 2019 and that the number has increased by 13% since 2011.
Perhaps CSI had nothing to do with it; the nature of the job itself can be just as alluring. If you don't think so, check out these stories from real pathologists who shared the strangest and wildest things they've ever come across inside people's bodies.
Autopsy professionals were prompted by one netizen, who asked: "People who perform autopsies, what was the weirdest/most unique anomaly you've found?" From extra organs to giant tumors and bullets in the cranium – these coroners have seen it all.
More info: Reddit
#1
I did an autopsy of a young kid around 10 yrs old who had hydrocephalus and was altho quadriplegic yet retained some of his normal functions. Like talking and understanding, albeit minimally.
When I opened his skull, there was no brain. I was shocked. This was my first time witnessing something like this but there was approx 1.5L of fluid and just an empty skull. The brain was so severely atrophied it was tinier than a golf ball. Amazing how he survived till 10!
Image credits: Danger-Doctor-419
#2
I've never performed an autopsy, but my friends (they were 3 siblings) growing up had a pathologist for a father. I was over their house so much, that I became a fixture in the family/included in most of their adventures.
Me and the oldest son got a hold of some liquor one night and got wasted. My father is an alcoholic, and it gave me a bad homelife/probably was a significant factor as to why I basically moved in with them.
We were caught. I was nervous and sad, expecting them to deem me a bad influence, and abandon me, a cycle I was familiar with. Their parents beckoned me in to the dining room, wanting a private talk. I braced for the worst, but Instead they sat me down, told me they loved me, and that I had to be careful with alcohol due to a*******n having genetic components. We talked a long time, and when it was over they informed Me I wasn't off the hook yet. Apparently they had a surprise for me and their son, which would blow my mind.
The next morning we were woken, and told to get dressed and get in the car with my friends dad (the pathologist). He drove us to his work, where he showed us a cadaver and the liver of a middle aged man who died of cirrhosis. It burned in my brain and I never forgot it. It had such an impact on me to see how alcohol destroys the body.
While I wish I could say i escaped alcoholism, I would go on to have my own struggles. But they probably would have been a lot worse if it weren't for this experience!
Image credits: Pitiful_Deer4909
#3
My dad had a kidney ailment and was one of the first people to receive kidney transplants. In fact, because of the nature of his disease, he had received three kidney transplants by the time he died. He intentionally donated his body to science in the hopes of freaking out some poor student when they autopsied him for a class and kept pulling out kidneys like they were some twisted meat handkerchiefs from a corpse clown or something.
I miss my dad. He was awesome.
Image credits: gamerthulhu
#4
An old woman with an incredibly thick skull all the way around. Her brain was much much smaller than it should have been but according to her family she was fully functional and displayed no deficits of any kind. She actually ran her own cheese making company and died from a carbon monoxide leak.
Strangest case I ever saw!
Image credits: User5711
#5
Situs Inversus. Basically all the organs were in mirrored anatomical positions from where they should normally be. So so cool.
Image credits: PaperClipehz
#6
Performing an autopsy on an elderly patient with cardiac valve disease and found a 3 cm white plastic disc lodged in the ostium of one of the renal arteries. It was identical to the disc of the patient's tilting valve type mechanical aortic valve which was in place, intact, and functioning normally. We had no explanation for why an extra valve disc was present far downstream from the heart.
An in depth review of the patient's surgical history revealed that many years prior, during the installation of the patient's aortic valve, the cage for the valve broke while being installed and the disc had flown into the aorta and couldn't be retrieved. The surgeon immediately removed the broken cage, replaced the entire apparatus with another replacement valve and completed the surgery. We found no evidence that there was any subsequent investigation to determine the whereabouts of the lost valve component.
So for years (apparently unknown to most of his caretakers and even potentially to the patient) the patient had a cardiac valve disc lodged in his renal artery ostium, in such a way that it was non-obstructing and stable, and it was discovered as an incidental finding at the patient's autopsy.
Image credits: vonGekko
#7
In a previous career I was a US army CID agent, and every death investigation that required an autopsy we had to send an agent to photograph and observe for the case file.
One guy who had been stabbed through the heart with a steak knife by his wife was in peak physical shape, but when the pathologist pulled his brain out he said "look at this". I have no biology training, but the golf ball sized tumor on his brainstem was obvious even to me. Doctor said he had maybe 90 days to live at the time of his death.
The wife went to prison for murder, and all she had to do was wait a few months and she'd have been a hero Army widow.
Image credits: Underwater_Karma
#8
Not a regular autopsy performer, but I do a lot with forensic archaeology (mostly natural mummies now) and had to take an A&P class that involved cadaver dissection. Female patient died at 102 of natural causes. We found that the joint of her left elbow was replaced with something that legitimately looked like a car part. It turns out she’d lived somewhere in Soviet Eastern Europe and had the procedure done some time in the 1960s, and it looked like that replacement was done with whatever they had available. It was absolutely incredible.
Image credits: amycusfinch
#9
I worked with a guy who had a lot of emotional baggage. When he was a teen, he and his younger brother were rough housing, and he pushed his younger brother against a wall. He said his brother stood there for a moment saying he didn't feel right, then dropped dead. In the autopsy the coroner discovered the younger brother's brainstem had been "dangling by a thread," and any bump to the head could have detached it. That he made it through the toddler years of learning to walk was a miracle. Crazy story and I felt bad for the guy because he still blamed himself for what was truly just a freak accident.
Image credits: PumpkinGlass1393
#10
I performed autopsies for almost a decade. The most unique thing I saw was uterine didelphys with a septate v****a. Basically, the v****a split in two and went to two separate cervixes and two separate uterine cavities. The two parts of the uterus fused into one heart-shaped body. I only saw that once.
Image credits: yeahprobablydrunk
#11
I observed a lot of things during my professional autopsies. The most notorious was a guy with four bullets '22 into the cranium. He didn't claim pain and apparently a normal.life. Daughter of him told me he was a gang member when young. He died from a cardiac arrest at 60 y o.
Image credits: vannerboere
#12
My aunt who worked as a pathologist told me of the time she did an autopsy on a newborn baby who was born seemingly healthy but was unable to feed and then died.
The baby's esophagus was not connected to his stomach, it was connected to his trachea and lungs instead. And the lungs were full of milk.
Image credits: Heroic-Forger
#13
As part of high school anatomy we went on a field trip to a local college to work with the bodies donated to science.
They had a sign “If you can’t find it they don’t have one”. A nearby body was missing some part of their digestive track (I forget what. Appendix?). They searched up and down. Just wasn’t there. No scar indicating removal either.
Another body was a dead biker. Heavy drinker. His body adjusted though. His liver was seriously twice the size of anyone else’s there (or more) stretching all the way across his torso. That liver was a beast.
Image credits: drakethrice
#14
An accessory spleen just hanging out attached to the intestines.
Image credits: mamallama2020
#15
I don't perform autopsies but I know someone with three kidneys that they have had since birth. Extremely rare.
Edit: I googled it before I posted and google AI says that like 100 people on earth have an extra kidney, but according to this post everyone an their mom has 3/4/5/50 kidneys. I dont know what to believe anymore. Would AI lie to me?!
Image credits: PatrickMorris
#16
Not an autopsy technically but a cadaver dissection, one cadaver had a small extra muscle in her wrist. We had no name for it since obviously 90% of people wouldn’t have a muscle there. She would never have known in life that she had it!
Image credits: Decicorium
#17
Not an autopsy per se, but back when I was working as a lab assistant, we received something that both the doctor in charge and I were stumped by. After many attempts at understanding what it was and cutting different sections, I finally realized it was a pretty malformed embryo. The tiny little head still breaks my heart. I’ve seen a lot of weird anomalies and held different organs in my hands, but that was a full human that could have never made it to life. It hits you in a different way.
Image credits: Lady-Dopamine
#18
I worked for the coroner'a office many years ago and picked up someone who had killed themselves by throwing their face on a SPINNING TABLE SAW. So, c*****d in half skull of course and it only got through to just before the neck started.
Imagining the pain you have to be in to choose that is nearly impossible for me. Like, staring at the spinning blade and deciding to do it. Wow.
#19
Im a funeral directr and was embalming a old woman who was still warm as she had just died like an hour before... i couldn't get any drainage at all l but I had the drain tube in her vein, opened up and the embalming fluid was pushing through it didn't make sense. I started rooting around in her vein and I saw some coagulation in the vein and used forceps to pull out a clot that looked like a tree branch. It was about 7 inches long and had branches from the smaller vessels.
She instantly started bleeding out. She was a great embalming.
Image credits: knittykittyemily
#20
A horseshoe kidney, both kidneys were fused at the lower ends. Another person had a missing lung lobe, so two lobes on each side, instead of two and three (without having had any surgery).
Image credits: notonthenightshift
#21
Veterinary pathologist here: aside from a bunch of conjoined twins, situs inversus etc, one fun one I found was some ambergris in the intestine of a whale.
#22
Had to do one in med school. Drowning victim. Found a catfish in their pocket.
#23
I don't do anything with bodies, but I did get to go to a hospital as a teen and get shown some strange specimens they had. What I won't ever forget is that they had a spleen in a jar, except inside it you could see a little fetus, maybe golf ball sized? Ectopic pregnancy that managed to implant inside the spleen. I don't know the odds but it seems pretty crazy.
#24
Veterinarian
I had a calf that died out in the field at about 14 days after a couple hours of respiratory distress that did not respond to antibiotics. We were expecting it to be pneumonia, which is fairly common in calves.
He had a double outflow right ventricle and just this little flap of nonfunctional left ventricle, so the blood entered the right atrium, went to the RV, out to the lungs, and back to the left atrium, where it entered the RV through a common AV valve. The blood also left the right ventricle through the aorta, so both pulmonary artery and aorta came off the right ventricle. There was significant dilation of the pulmonary artery from pulmonary hypertension and he developed congestive heart failure. Pretty neat, a bit sad, and very unexpected.
Really cool to see a single ventricle heart in a mammal, almost like a lizard, and wild that he made it to 14 days like that.
Image credits: daabilge
#25
In Medical School I attended one Autopsie where the Patient had a fistula (connection) between his Aortic artery and his Esophagus. He bled to death that way. Scary to think about that.
Image credits: TyrosinLennyster
#26
In detective school, we visited the Medical Examiner's Office. One of the decedents in the lab was a middle-aged woman who had been registered as an organ donor. After she died in the hospital, they removed what organs were viable for transplant. Two of these organs were her femurs (removed for marrow for leukemia patients) which had been replaced by 1×3s. I have to say, no matter what I anticipated going in, I did not expect to see lumber inside a dead lady's legs.
#27
At my first and only autopsy, the pathologist scraped some green paste off of the magnum foramen of the skull. I asked what it was, and he said, "A vegetation." I was a high school senior at the time, and very very puzzled by that answer.
As an attending radiologist, I see vegetations all the time in vivo now, and I will always think of them as green because of that first autopsy. Except Aspergillis, which is black.
Image credits: Spiteblight
#28
Step mom is a funeral director/enbalmer and had a deceased with a 6" tail just below their spinal cord.
#29
A lady had, some 30 years ago, drank draino to unalive herself after her mother died. She lived.
But destroyed her insides. She ended up having her intestines connected to her esophagus as her stomach was removed from too much damage.
What. A. Mess.
#30
Horseshoe kidneys ☺️ have seen this twice in my 10 year mortuary career. Huge pericarditis pus build up that was 500ml in volume and bright green. Intestines that had herniated into a man's testicles. Have seen many accessory spleens which are very cute 🥰 I have so many other cool things but these rank up there. Oh just wanted to add that jumping maggots are a thing, fun times!
Image credits: panowshamwow
#31
I don’t do autopsies, but my wife has two blood types from as far back as they could tell past her birth. They just thought it was an error the first time it happened in middle school. I’m sure they’re going to find some interesting stuff when she dies (hopefully a very long time from now).
#32
No an autopsy but a human dissection for anatomy class.
We were working on the shoulder area and hit something hard. It wasn’t a bone and made a “clinking” noise.
Turns out our cadaver had a shoulder joint replacement and we were hitting the metal “ball” (for lack of a better term?)
It doesn’t sound like much but it freaked the heck out of a bunch of second year students!!
That was many many years ago and the reason I stopped pursuing medicine!
Image credits: 2018_is_my_year
#33
A massive aortic dissection. The woman's aorta was enormous, wider than a garden hose. EDIT: I meant a fire hose lol.
Image credits: Anoia_The_Anancastic
#34
I’ve never preformed an autopsy. My dad passed away from cancer and had his body donated to science at a local school how cremated him afterwards. What he wanted done with his ashes was have them loaded into live shotgun shells so when you shot them, his ashes would be spread. There’s a company that does this (Holy Smoke?) but we figured we would save money and just do it ourselves since I reload shotgun shells anyway.
While sorting through his ashes, we found part of his mediport, something that we figured was from his knee surgery, and a copper BB from a BB gun. When he was 10, he was hanging out with some friends and one of them had just gotten a BB gun for his birthday, was playing with the trigger and shot my dad just above his right eye. It went under the skin and was there the rest of his life. If you touched it, it would roll around a bit lol. I asked why he never told his parents he said “why would I want to get into trouble if I didn’t need to”.
#35
Back in 1990 was completing a group autopsy in an advanced human anatomy class. 85 year old patient had a tumor in her brain. It was the size of a Golfball on her right lobe. Unknown to her prior to death, her physician. Died in her sleep naturally. The tumor was not malignant but most likely caused some wicked headaches along with other symptoms. The stuff you find. The body is a wonder.
Image credits: Appropriate_Bad74247
#36
Once with this strangely pretty cadaver I found a fully calcified gallbladder that looked like a porcelain teacup. Googled it later and it’s apparently super rare and can be linked to cancer. We took turns gently passing it around like some weird Victorian relic.
#37
I'm not dead quite yet, but I have extra bones in my feet! They're called accessory bones, and they're not rare. They aren't usually a problem and are left in place. I found mine because I went to a podiatrist for plantar fasciitis and had x-rays done on my feet.
#38
Not an autopsy, but with a cadaver I got to work on during a brief stint in nursing school, the poor lady had thick black tar in her lungs from a lifetime of smoking. I was a smoker at the time and it honestly led to me quitting.
During my time as a Veterinary Nurse (I decided I wasn't suited to humans) I got to help with some interesting autopsies in dogs, cats, pocket pets, and even a parrot. I distinctly remember one cat who died as a result of sepsis as her kittens had died and decomposed in her, the smell of her uterus being opened was horrific. Another was a ruptured closed pyometra in a dog, where the infected uterus had burst and filled her abdominal cavity with pus. There were quite a few cancers.
#39
Not an autopsy but we had a guy die, by David Carradine’ing himself, who had an elaborate piercing. He basically had multiple p***s piercings locked together with a padlock. Wife had no clue where the key was for the coroner. .
Image credits: ProtectandserveTBL
#40
Not my story, but a friend's. She was working on a DOA at a hospital and noticed something lodged in the girl's throat. She slit open the girl's throat to find a baggy full of d***s that the girl had tried to swallow. As soon as she pulled it out, the corpse took a breath and opened her eyes. Cue alarms and doctors and nurses, and apparently the girl made a full recovery.
EDIT: Again, not my story but a friend's. I have no reason to believe she was lying. Adding more detail to this story. I meant DOA as in she was "dead" when she arrived at the hospital. I don't know all the details of how someone gets picked up by ambulance and is pronounced dead. I can not speak to what happened between the time the girl was picked up and the time my friend ended up with the body. I do know I mis-stated the timing of this. She was not performing an autopsy at the time. Which means this probably shouldn't have been put as an answer to this question. I don't know the reason why, but she was picking up the body from the ER to transport to the morgue. It was still in the ER where she noticed the lump and cut open the girl's throat. And for the 3rd time, not my story, so take the truthfulness of it as you will.
Image credits: ashton8177
#41
I didn't perform an autopsy, I'm a med student here, we came across a cadaver where the kidneys were located way too higher than the normal ones, and the spleen was highly distorted in shape.
#42
I had a guy with 3 testies lol.
Image credits: Kittymow13
#43
Unfortunately the other interesting thing I've found was extra nipples.
Image credits: Kaito_01
#44
Not human, but I knew a veterinarian whose university cremated all deceased animals on site. A pet owner came a few days after his dog died, asking for his ashes, so someone went out and scooped up some random ashes that were there to give him. The next day the owner called asking if it was the nail in the ashes that had killed his dog - turned out they had scooped up a horseshoe nail in the ashes!
#45
I found a junior mint while doing an autopsy. It was lodged in the persons rib.
#46
I only did a month long rotation at the medical examiner’s office in med school but there was a guy with such bad metastatic liver disease, and it was distributed so diffusely/uniformly through the liver that it almost looked normal in a way. Like that’s just how it was supposed to look.
#47
Subject was approximately 112 degrees at time of autopsy, indicating an increase in body temperature. Examiner attempted to verify this rectally, only to find subject was without r****m.
I did a full laparotomy. I started with the lesser curvature of the stomach.
Feel that? Where the piloric junction would be?
Push it aside. Notice anything strange? Stomach? Liver? Lungs?
...they're all missing.
