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Abstract
Far from seeing for oneself, as coroners and coroners' juries had formerly done in inquest cases, pathologists now did all the necessary "seeing" on society's behalf in specially designed mortuaries. The "view" of the body to confirm the identity of the deceased thus became separated from the autopsy to find the cause of death. From the mid-19th century, pathologists also began to lay down protocols for the conduct of autopsies-rules about how to "see", what to look for, where, and in what order. Increasingly, they came to distinguish "true" post-mortem appearances from "artifacts" and other misleading phenomena that occurred after death, and, more reluctantly, to accept that even "true" post-mortem appearances did not always reveal the cause of death.