Autopsy [antikvár]

Foreword by Bernard Knight, M.D. Although Maton Helpern, retired Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York, was probably the world's best known forensic pathologist, this professional supremacy was not his only major attribute. Above all else, he was a gentleman—and a gentle man. This very quality gave rise to some difficulty when I was helping Dr. Helpern to put together his memoirs, for his natural reticence made it more than a little difficult to draw out some of the more personal matters that are the stock-in-trade of biography. If one steered Milton onto an interesting homicide, he would talk for hours. Get him on the subject of improving the legal medicine system in the country and he would talk for days! But when I would gently edge him toward personal matters, his characteristically mischievous grin would appear as he would shake his head and say, "Ah, who wants to know about that stuff!" Autobiography in these circumstances is harder to unfold than the third-person approach of a biography. This is the reason for these few introductory words, to say just a few of the things that would never have fallen from the lips of "Milt" himself. Sadly, we shall never hear that mellow voice again, for regretfully these preliminary pages have had to be re-written in the past tense. Between the completion of the manuscript and the date of publication, this gentle giant of a personality died, on April 22, 1977, a few days after his seventy-fifth birthday. He passed away in San Diego, far from his beloved New York City. Characteristically, he had travelled across the continent, age and ill-health notwithstanding, in order to attend the annual convention of one of the forensic organizations that he ix