SUBMODULE 4.1. BASICS OF THE DOCTRINE OF INJURIES
Forensic doctrine of injuries is a part of forensic pathology on causes, methods of examination and criteria of forensic evaluation of injuries.
In forensic pathology, an injury is disruption of body structure or function resulting from one or several external factors. The effect of external factors may damage the integrity of organs and tissues in a living or dead body. In the former case, the damaging factor affects both the function and the structure, postmortem injuries do not affect the function since the function ceases with death.
A damaging factor is an object (material body able to act mechanically) or a phenomenon (electric current, high or low temperature, radiation energy, etc.) able to inflict injuries. Damaging factors can inflict local injuries (mechanical factors) or predominantly general injuries (barometric factors). Most ofthem produce both general and local effects (thermal, radiation, electric and chemical factors).
Damaging factors vary greatly; however, the list of their damaging properties is limited. They are classified into physical, chemical and biological. In their turn, physical factors are subdivided into mechanical (blunt, sharp and gunshot injuries), thermal, electric, barometric and radiation injuries; biological factors are subdivided into microbial, antigen, etc.
The causal mechanism of an injury is interaction between a damaging factor and the affected part of the body (or the whole body). A damaging factor is able to cause injury only through contact with tissues provided it had sufficient energy to destroy biological structures. The interaction is limited in time and, in practice, a forensic pathologist can judge about it only according to the consequences, i.e., morphologic and functional signs of injuries reflecting the features of a specific object and peculiarities of a specific traumatic mechanism. This approach allows an objective assessment of possibility or impossibility