SUBMODULE 1.1. CONCEPT, SUBJECT AND ORGANIZATION OF FORENSIC PATHOLOGY
Forensic medicine is a medical discipline, which is a system of scientific knowledge about the causal mechanisms, research methods and expert evaluation of medical facts used as a source of evidence during investigation and in court.
The subject of forensic pathology is the theory and practice of forensic examination. Forensic pathology searches for solutions to medical and biological problems arising in investigations and trials. Relevant scientific issues constitute the content of forensic pathology.
In practice, a forensic pathologist most often evaluates the degree of damage to human health resulting from criminal activity. This damage is caused by external influence and is called an injury. Both injuries and external influences vary greatly. Identifying the regularities in the emergence of injuries, research methods and expert evaluation is one of the main issues of forensic pathology - forensic doctrine of injuries.
Forensic doctrine of death an postmortem processes (forensic thanatology) includes confirmation of a living being's death, establishment of its cause and time, the effects produced by animate and inorganic nature on the dead body, as well as methods and techniques helping to identify these facts and provide an adequate expert evaluation.
Forensic knowledge is required to identify an unknown, dismembered or skeletonized cadaver as well as a suspect, victim and other people related to the case. The theoretic and practical issues of identification according to medical and biological criteria constitute another domain of forensic pathology, forensic identification.
An important aspect of forensic pathology is forensic examination - a set of practical methods to utilize scientific data on injuries, death and identifica-