Originally posted by JeffHamm
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Yes, your hands would be telling a story about the environment they had been in, just like Chapmans body would do in Hanbury Street. You seem to have gotten tangled up in your own thinking, taking it as useful, which it is not. I have said a zillion times that I or anybody else cannot establish the precise TOD using either hand palpation or thermometer. But that does not equal that I cannot tell if a body has been long dead or if it is a case of recent death.
If the body is in a temperature of nine degrees, like Chapmans body was, and if it is quite warm to the touch, then I can say with 100 per cent certainty that death is not far removed in time, unless you have bee around with your bucket of hot water. Equally if the body is cold to the touch, I can say with 100 per cent certainty that death is not very close in time.
That is not to say that I can establish the exact temperatures by feeling the body, because that is impossible to do, although a trained medico will certainly be able to get close if death is not very far away in time.
Once again, extrapolating the fact that hand palpation is less safe than thermometer reading into a belief that a doctor cannot tell warm bodies from cold ones is not a clever thing to do. Just because we cannot kill tigers with fly-swatters, that does not mean that we cannot kill moths and flies with it. Although a method can be unreliable to a degree in some respects, that does not mean that the same method must ALWAYS be unreliable.
But I believe I have told you all of this before. It seems it is more a quetion of you putting your hands over your ears, chanting away.
Bye now.
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