∇
troperville

∇
tools

∇
toys

Must be Monday. New podcast! Just click on the fancy logo below.

SubpagesMain

main index

Narrative

Genre

Media

Topical Tropes

Other Categories

random

Subpages:

source

history

edit page

The Coroner

"Unlike the living, when the dead speak, they do not lie."

As coroner, I must aver,
I thoroughly examined her
And she's not only merely dead,
She's really most sincerely dead!

— The Munchkin Coroner, The Wizard of Oz

"Here, death rejoices in teaching the living."

— Inscription commonly found in autopsy/anatomy theaters (usually rendered in Latin: Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae.)

Also known as the Medical Examiner or ME, he or she tells the detectives how the victim died and hands them any interesting trace evidence. Typically, this professional is the detectives' first stop depicted after examining the crime scene such as in Law & Order.

The coroner is typically depicted in crime shows as a middle-aged, dryly sardonic male whose daily handling of corpses has left him thoroughly desensitized to even the most horrible of deaths. This is usually played for comic effect, such as having the coroner eat a sandwich while working, or reacting calmly to a murder so gruesome it even freaks out the heroes. Many have a tendency to speak to the deceased, either in jokes or sympathy over a particularly violent death. This tends to be Truth in Television.

Note that in Real Life the position of coroner may or may not be held by a medical doctor. In some jurisdictions both positions are held by the same person, but in others the coroner is a lawyer or paralegal who handles the paperwork, conducts inquiries, etc., while the medical examiner is a forensic pathologist who conducts the autopsies. In some areas, too, there aren't enough suspicious deaths to justify the cost of a full-time forensic pathologist; in these areas, a local surgeon or GP usually handles less suspicious cases while obvious murders are farmed out to freelance forensic pathologists. Also, in Real Life most deaths reported to the coroner or medical examiner aren't investigated, since most deaths that have to be reported aren't suspicious deaths.

Interestingly, most forensic pathology residents these days are women; in twenty years, it's estimated that almost all medical examiners will be female.

Not to be confused with The Undertaker, who has an entirely different job.

Examples:

open/close all folders

Anime and Manga

Runessa Magnus from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Teana's temporary partner for the Mariage case in StrikerS Sound Stage X. Handles autopsies and verification, she usually works behind the scenes.
Dr. Harashaw of Ghost in the Shell: Innocence Notable for being a cybernetic pathologist - she's called in by Section 9 to look at "dead" cyber-bodies and determine how they, er, terminally malfunctioned.
The rather depressed Dr. Knox of Fullmetal Alchemist averts the usual attitude of this trope, and is grateful that he gets to save Lan Fan and May Chang. Though he would never admit it.

Comic Books

For a few years, Mortimer Gunt in the Batman comics.
- Currently Dr. Nora Fields. Her desensitization is partially because she's the Gotham City coroner, and as such, has been through everything including the autopsy on her own husband's shattered, frozen body and having her arm blown off by the Joker.

Films — Live-Action

In the film Men In Black, Dr. Laurel Weaver (Linda Fiorentino).
Taken to ridiculous extremes in the German comedy movie The Vexxer by the grossly incompetent medical examiner, Dr. Bedpan, who is having a children's birthday party in his morgue.
Dr. Bedpan: We've got painters in the flat. It's my son's eighth birthday, so we've moved the party here.
Inspector Even Longer: Why here? Where's your wife, then?
Dr. Bedpan: Over there, slab 207.
In Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Van Helsing, played by Mel Brooks, manages to make interns faint out of pure disgust as he works on a body... and keeps SCORE of the interns that fainted!!!
"As coroner, I must aver, I've thoroughly examined her...and she's not only merely dead, she's really most sincerely dead!

Literature

Subverted in the book The Westing Game. The dead man isn't really dead—in fact, the "corpse" is a wax dummy—and the coroner is in on the whole thing.
Dr. Kay Scarpetta, of the series by Patricia Cornwell. Before the series degenerated into total Writer on Board, she served as the Chief M.E. of Virginia, and had the MD/JD to back it up.
The coroner, Doctor Hugel, in Jed Rubenfield�s Interpretation of Murder, has been given the nickname 'The Ghoul' for the eagerness with which he performs his post mortems. He also gets this line:
"Altogether a fine female chest. The heart and lungs - the perfect example of healthy asphyxiated tissue. Why - it was a pleasure to hold them in one�s hands!"
Dr. Ito in the Sano Ichiro series, a position that is especially tricky in Edo-period Japan as performing autopsies violates Shinto practices of the time. In addition, he uses forbidden Western medicine knowledge and techniques to do them, an issue which has already gotten him "exiled" to Edo Jail.
Dr Waldo Butters from The Dresden Files. He lets Harry and Murphy into the morgue and treats Harry's injuries when he can't go to the hospital. Also: "Polka will never die!"
In Athyra, the village physician Master Wag teaches young Savn how to examine a dead body to determine how it got that way.

Live-Action TV

Quincy, eponymous main character of Quincy (aka Quincy, ME).
Al Robbins (played by Robert David Hall) on the original (Las Vegas) CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Also David 'Superdave' Philips, assistant coroner (played by former real life coroner David Berman)
Alexx Woods (played by Khandi Alexander) on CSI: Miami, although she was eventually Put on a Bus.
- Later replaced by Tara Price, who was later replaced by the fairly goofy Tom Loman after getting busted for drug addiction.
  - Shannon Higgins, who actually replaced Alexx...only to take one right between the eyes shortly after her debut. Ouch. Tara wound up replacing her shortly thereafter.
Dr Sheldon Hawkes in the first season of CSI NY, replaced in season 2 by Dr Sid Hammerback when Hawkes decides to become a CSI himself. Hammerback has Cool Glasses. There's also been Dr. Evan Zao (who disappeared with no trace), Dr. Peyton Driscoll (who got Put on a Bus) and Dr. Marty Pino (who showed up twice in season 2 before showing up again in season 5, having been fired from the coroner's office, become a gambling addict, and making the money for his gambling debts by make drugs out of dead drug users and selling it. He also happens to get his wife killed in that episode and ends up in jail by the end of it.
Most of the cast on Crossing Jordan.
Coroner Rick, on Stroker and Hoop, is a parodic version of this character.
During its 13 year run, Inspector Morse went through a number of coroners and pathologists, with varying degrees of desensitisation.
The unfortunately-named Donald "Ducky" Mallard (David McCallum), NCIS.
The ever-cheerful George Bullard in Midsomer Murders (except for a brief spell when the ME was snarky replacement Dan Peterson).
On Law & Order and Law And Order Criminal Intent, Elizabeth Rodgers (Leslie Hendrix). On Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie).
On The X-Files, Dr. Dana Scully's specialty certification is in pathology; prior to and occasionally during her tenure in the eponymous unit, she taught forensic path at the FBI Academy in Quantico.
Non-standard personality type: Doug Murphy of Scrubs. Despite being a pathologist, or at least working in the morgue, he retains a very odd mix of loser and cloudcuckoolander. In fact, the reason he was shifted to the morgue is that he is a horrible doctor, having killed nearly all of his patients. This is what leads him to being such a great pathologist: he has seen nearly every way someone can die, because he probably caused it at one time or another. Still, he is seen forgetting where he left bodies, tagging patients before they've died, and playing Texas Hold'Em with a group of corpses.
Pushing Daisies has an (unnamed) coroner who lets the main characters into the morgue in every episode, complete with an incredibly dry wit and the tendency to be skeptical about any excuse he's given for needing to see the bodies. Word Of God say he lets them in because he has a crush on Emerson.
On Tru Calling, Davis is completely desensitized to anything dead, but extremely squicked out by working on anyone living.
The Reality Show Doctor G, Medical Examiner, which bounces between the various Discovery Channel networks.
Dr. Lanie Parish in Castle.
- Also Dr. Sidney Perlmutter - one of the M Es who eats his lunch in the morgue. Thanks to the industrial-strength disinfectants, it's the cleanest place in the city.
Natalie Lambert from Forever Knight was a city medical examiner, although her work was only occasionally relevant to the plot.
Dr. Maura Isles of Rizzoli And Isles; also gets points for an amusing tendency not to notice which of the morgue refrigerators is for staff use.
"Is this from the good fridge or the dead-people fridge?"
Gordy the Ghoul from Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Ran a lottery based on the corpses time of death. Often bribed by Kolchak into giving him information.
Psych plays with the trope. Woody looks like the typical coroner... except he's full out a Cloud Cuckoolander . He's predicted how Shawn and Gus will die, offered to hold organs in the freezer overnight (not for medical reasons), and when he woke up from a drunken stupor surrounded by a white powder he assumes his cocaine problem returned. But his autopsies are usually right, at least.
In Supernatural, a different one appears in many episodes (since the Winchesters are moving all over the country working on cases) to explain to the Winchesters how the latest Victim of the Week met his or her gruesome end.
Dr. Ogden in Murdoch Mysteries is more sensitive than most examples, but her occasional mild jokes over the bodies are enough to make the straitlaced Murdoch uncomfortable. (And not for the usual reason being around Dr. Ogden makes Murdoch uncomfortable.) Her temporary replacement at the start of Season 4, Dr. Francis, maintains a constant stream of barbed sarcasm, apparently thinking Murdoch discovers murders just to annoy him.
Sherlock has a recurring female coroner whom the title character frequently annoys with his constant observations of little things about her.
There are a number of pathologists on the German police procedural series Tatort, the most famous and popular being Wagner-loving Professor Karl-Friedrich Boerne (Jan Josef Liefers) of M�nster. In the episode Der doppelte Lott he even has a cross-over with his colleague from the Cologne "Tatort", Dr. Joseph Roth. (Joe Bausch, the man playing Dr. Roth is a doctor in real life.)
Mort, the opera-singing coroner on Due South.

Tabletop Games

Common character in Delta Green, examples include Dr. Jean Qualls and Dr. Joseph Gutierrez. There are also several pre-made Player Character templates for M.E.
This is a pretty common character archetype in World of Darkness gamelines (the other would be the detective), since one's first brush with the supernaturals is usually at the receiving end of their murderous power, or examining someone who were in such an unenviable position.
Wagner eyed the four deep furrows running diagonally across the man's chest. They'd cut through tissue and bone as cleanly as a saw. Four guys couldn't have done that at the same time. No way.
Not four assailants, Detective. Feingold raised his left hand to the light. Four fingers. These are claw marks.

Video Games

Membrillo from the game Grim Fandango is a traditional example, down to the dark sense of humor. Well, aside from the fact that since he works in the Land of the Dead, the "corpses" he deals with are those who've been "sprouted" and are thus Deader Than Dead...
Membrillo: The secret to my happiness, Manuel, is I have the heart of a 12 year old child. I keep it in a jar over here. Would you like to see it?
Manny: No.
Membrillo: Sorry, old coroner joke.
(Membrillo translates as "Quince" - surely a nod to Quincy?)
In a skit, Jade in Tales Of The Abyss will mention that as a boy, he wanted to become a doctor... of pathology. As an adult, he joined the military instead, but still retained the coroner's unflappability and dark sense of humour.
Naomi Kirishima's specialty in Trauma Team.

Western Animation

Hey Arnold!: Arnold and Gerald once met a coroner during their search for a document that'd save their neighborhood. One of them opened a drawer that contained a corpse. The coroner wasn't even slightly disgusted by it.