Profile of autopsy cases conducted by Forensic Medicine Department, Government Medical College, Surat during pandemic year-2020

The profile of autopsy cases are necessary for taking necessary preventive measures in future. New civil hospital is a government tertiary care center in south Gujarat where annually approximately 2500 cases are brought for postmortem examination. Forensic medicine department conducts postmortem examination of expert level cases which are directly brought by investigating officer or referred from medical officers. Manner of death is very important for the investigating officers to determine the nature of investigation. In the year 2020 total 131 expert post mortem were done by forensic medicine department. Surat is amongst the fastest growing city in the world and so it is also having so many migrant population. People from all over India migrate to Surat for earning their bread and butter. Migrant population have their own issues regarding unemployment, disparity on income, extra marital relationships, substance abuse etc. If their struggle continues at workplace, it will lead to more and more stress. Some may not be able to cope up with the stress level and might end their lives or take someone else's life.

The present study is a retrospective study. It includes all the autopsy cases conducted by forensic medicine department, government medical college and new civil hospital Surat from 1 Jan 2020 to 31 Dec 2020. The emphasis was given on age, sex, cause of death, manner of death, mode of death, causative weapons. All these data were collected and analyzed.

In the year 2020 total 131 expert post mortem were done by forensic medicine department, Surat out of them 89 male, 41 female and 1 unknown. Among them mode of death 26.72 % asphyxia, 20.61% coma, 33.59% syncope, 9.16% pending and 9.92% undetermined, manner of death 48.09% homicidal, 14.5% suicidal, 6.11% accidental, 12.98% natural death cases, 9.92% negative autopsy, 15.26% cases the time since death was within 12 hours; 33.59% cases it was between 12 hours to 24 hours.

Present study evaluates the expert and referred autopsy cases conducted by the forensic medicine department, Government medical college and new civil hospital Surat. Being a tertiary center majority of the cases are of allegation and highly suspicious nature. So very few cases of road traffic accident and natural deaths or obvious suicidal death cases are brought to our department. So sometimes it becomes a challenging work to determine manner of the death, causative weapon and time since death.