Extensive Soft Tissue Injuries as a Cause of Death

The blunt trauma injury is the most common type, a pathologist encounter when doing medico-legal autopsies. Sometimes, while searching the main cavities of the body for the fatal injuries like lacerations and damages to the vital organs, we, the Forensic Pathologist commonly ignores the superficial small abrasions, bruises over the other parts of the body. Cutaneous injuries i.e. abrasions, contusions in most cases, are not fatal and are seemingly unimportant. However, soft tissue injuries not always are simple as mostly described in the literature but sometimes these injuries may be so extensive internally that leads to irreversible shock. In fact, these injuries prove fatal when taken collectively into consideration. Sometimes trivial circumstances lead to serious quarrel, resulting into death of the victim which apparently looking uninjured externally while conducting autopsy. Under such circumstances sometimes at primary health care centres the inexperienced autopsy surgeons are not in a position to correlate the superficial looking soft tissue injuries attributing towards death.