Mechanical Trauma and Classification of Wounds

Different sorts of trauma cause characteristic patterns of injury and it is often the task of the forensic pathologist to reconstruct the causal mechanism of the injury based on the wound pattern. Primary causes of death due to mechanical violence include the following: destruction of vital organs, mechanical handicaps of the functioning of vital organs, bleeding to death, embolism and suffocation. Blunt trauma is often contrasted with penetrating trauma, in which an object such as a knife or a bullet enters the body. Forensic neuropathology is a specialized discipline of pathology and is required in cases where gross autopsy findings of the medical examiner's casework suggest not only a death due to a trauma or disease of the head, skull, brain, spine, or spinal cord, but secondary alterations of the central nervous system caused by physiologic responses or metabolic cascades to the primary event.