Significance of Gastric Lavage in Viscera of Death Due to Poisoning

Failure to find any poison in viscera of the individual whose death was allegedly due to poisoning is a routine problem in India and the reasons of it are explained by various authors. In practice of Forensic Medicine, it is commonly observed in hospitalized patients who are treated for few days before death. The present autopsy based retrospective study was carried out on 289 corpses, which were brought to us for autopsy examination in year of 2008. The aim was to increase the results of positive FSL report to confirm and assure the exact nature and type of poisoning on the basis of chemical analysis and hence to achieve this particular aim we at our center also send additional sample of gastric lavage other than routine viscera of autopsy. After our this process of investigation, we found that the positive results of chemical analysis which were 53.36% without the samples of gastric lavage improved significantly to 83.33% after sending the lavage sample with routine viscera of autopsy, which suggest that the investigation and correlation of ante-mortem samples with viscera reports are of great significance and cannot be ignored, so as to reach a confirmatory conclusion.