The use of Body Temperature in Estimating the Time of Death and its Limitations

T H E evidential value of the pathologist's deductions as to the time of death is not great If the time could be fixed accurately, it would undoubtedly become part of the prosecution's evidence in every murder trial but as things stand at the moment, no sensible doctor would dare go into the witness box and state the exact time of death if he had deduced it from the post-mortem changes in the body. Fortun­ ately, there is no indication that the lack of this evidence is a serious handicap in the majority of cases. Usually, the time of death can be deduced with sufficient accuracy from non-medical evidence. This non-medical evidence takes time to col­ lect, however, and in the early stages of the inquiry, an estimate by the police surgeon or the forensic pathologist as to when death probably occurred is very helpful: it gives the police a starting point for their inquiries and allows them to deal more efficiently with the information which comes to hand, enabling some suspects to be eliminated and a search for the likely culprit to be started earlier. Most of the changes which take place in the body after death have been used at one time or another as a "post-mortem clock." Davy (1839) first suggested the use of the temperature of the corpse for timing death and the intro­ duction of thermometers to clinical practice seemed to offer the most scientific method of timing death because of the simple and accur­ ate way in which the progressive fall of tem­ perature of the corpse could be measured. The rectal temperature is still looked upon as pro­ viding the most valuable information on which to base an estimate. For instance, Simpson (1965) states: " T h e rate of loss of heat from a cadaver offers one of the more reliable methods of estimating the time which has elapsed since death up to a period of about