History of Coroners: The Truth You Never Knew

Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan

CrimeOnline and iHeartPodcasts

True Crime

4.7 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2024

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The National Institutes of Health, comparing a medical examiner and coroner, states that Coroners are elected lay people who often do not have professional training, whereas medical examiners are appointed and have board certification in a medical specialty.

All of this is true.

On this episode of "Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan," Joe will take you back in history to a time when the person who finds the dead body in their yard has to gather a posse and solve the murder mystery or be stuck with paying taxes!!

The coroner system has a long history, some funny stories, some strange people, and a few mysteries to unpack.

Transcript Highlights

00:22.56. Introduction of studying the dead.

03:04.63 Discussion most people don’t die from bullet wounds

06:01.87 Talk about forensics

11:38.68 History of “Normans”

17:44.17 Discussion of power of Coroners

22:25.90 Discussion of Coroners Jury

26:18.76 Discussion of authority of coroner

31:00.67 Discussion of scientific people in coroner system

32:05.27 Talk about who backs up the coroner

37:48.5 Discussion of medical examiner state vs coroner state

42:49.50 Conclusion

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Bodybags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Way back when, when I was in high school, you had these elective classes that you could take primarily related to
0:26.1	humanities and for me there was a class that really caught my attention.
0:33.4	First off, the thing that was so glaring about it
0:36.3	was the fact that the name was odd.
0:38.6	I'd never heard of it before.
0:39.7	The name of the class was called Fanontology.
0:43.4	And it sounds like something you'd study
0:44.7	at a graduate level of the university,
0:46.4	but when I began to understand what that actually meant,
0:50.7	that we would be studying the dead and all things associated with death, I was
0:58.0	intrigued to say the least. And it was in this class that I first, all those years ago, first considered the word
1:12.0	coroner. Coroner.
1:13.0	Today we're going to have a discussion about the office of coroner.
1:21.0	What does it mean?
1:22.0	What's its origins and what's the status even today? I'm Joseph
1:27.8	Scott Morgan and this is body backs. Let me tell how ignorant I am, Dave.
1:35.0	We'll start off the conversation this way.
1:38.0	Wow.
1:39.0	When I first heard the word coroner or title coroner I thought because I knew enough to know that it had to do with death
1:50.8	the office had something to do with death, obviously. But I didn't understand the origin of the word. I thought that it probably had something to do with coronary or like coronary artery or coronary
2:03.7	vessels, you know, because and look at it stands to reason because the number one
2:09.6	killer in America is coronary artery disease.
	...

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