Angst-ridden TV detectives have been overshadowed by cool, smart-talking pathologists. It is too easy to blame the makers of TV drama for glamorising the business of post-mortems, but they are merely capitalising on the public's voyeuristic fascination with suspicious death. There are those who attend coroners courts the way others frequent the cinema - providing of course the deceased is not known to them.
State Pathologist Prof John Harbison does not mythologise death. "The body is a thing, not a person. The person is dead," and he agrees he views a corpse pretty much as a mechanic does a faulty car. "My job is to ascertain the cause of death." He does not see himself as an investigator. "I'm not a policeman. But yes, we are police surgeons. I'm not interested in the crime itself. I don't pass judgment, it's not my job."
A curious mixture of matter-of-fact and shrewdly zany, Harbison at 63 is a colourful, slightly old-world character with humour black enough to suit the job. Obviously not immune to the potential theatrics of the situations he regularly finds himself in, he is also amused by the image of absent-minded professor, one he has cultivated. His gestures are that of a far older person; his demeanour wary, at times concerned, but always alert and above all, detached if kindly. Only his eyes look young.
Bearded, tweed-wearing, spectacles resting near the tip of nose . . . his gait is best described as a laconic slouch. The abundant white hair is now so famously wayward that a hair-cut is capable of transforming his appearance - if only for a couple of weeks. Both his accent and formal delivery, heavily underscored by the tones of a public school background, belong to a Dublin of another era. His job-related anecdotes are well capable of deflecting - and have deflected - even the keenest diners from their supper.
All too many news programmes have included footage of his arrivals at scenes of crimes as he makes his first viewing of the body. He is often seen dressed in a white overall and rubber boots, clambering over ditches to approach an area cordoned off by the Garda. The awaiting bodies are frequently in advanced stages of decomposition, "scavengers, particularly rats, can do a lot of damage very quickly". He doesn't believe in modifying the realities of the job: "When decomposition begins, things rapidly become very smelly."
Harbison is usually called in by the Garda Technical Bureau, although in some cases a county coroner - of which there are 49 - (Cork and Donegal have four each) will contact him. At one stage last year, in the course of five days, he was asked to examine nine bodies. His requests for a deputy were finally satisfied when Dr Marie Cassidy was formally appointed last January.
Aware of the ambivalent attitudes surrounding his work, he initially admits to "being neither amused or irritated by the public perception of his work" but then concedes he is "a bit irritated at times". Somewhat unexpectedly, he says he does tune in to any new police series if there is a pathologist featured. "It's mainly to watch the credits. I like to see who their advisers are." He mentions a recent programme in which "an aggressive female pathologist cross-examined a witness. Aside from her rudeness, it's not part of her job to cross-examine anyone. It's so far removed from reality. The best I ever saw was a programme called The Expert, it starred Marius Goring and he was very good indeed."
Appointed to the job in 1974, Harbison is the State's first forensic pathologist and is currently awaiting new offices at Dublin's Beaumont Hospital. Meanwhile, he continues to work from Trinity College, from where he graduated in medicine in 1960 and where he has lectured in medical jurisprudence since 1974. He was appointed Professor of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1991. The son of a doctor who held various positions as county and city medical officer, Harbison says he drifted into medicine, "there were lots of doctors in the family, cousins and such like on both sides".
Unlikely to offer any passionate claims about being committed to healing, he says it has been about 37 years since he last had a live patient. "I'd describe myself as something of a medical misfit, lacking the necessary sympathy for patients. I found I could talk to them but I was not interested in sick people. So I escaped to the lab instead." A forensic pathologist serves an apprenticeship; the training is acquired by exposure to the realities of the job.
The 1960s were his apprenticeship. During eight years as a clinical pathologist - which included a year as senior house officer at Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin in 1961; a year at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, 1963 to 1964; a year as demonstrator in pathology at the University of Bristol; a year as registrar in pathology at Radcliffe Infirmary and Churchill Hospital in Oxford; and two years as assistant pathologist at the Department of Pathology in TCD - Harbison had moved steadily closer to the work he really wanted. His specialist forensic training was consolidated while working as a lecturer in forensic medicine at the University of Leeds.
Emotional detachment is essential to any doctor: "It's no use to anyone if you get involved. But I don't harbour any negative feelings, or even feelings, towards the suspect either". For him the job is about being a public servant. "It is a public service, it helps the course of justice." His reports are used as evidence in court. Harbison contributes a chapter on pathology in a new book, The Role of the Expert Witness, to be published next month. In an average year, he will be called upon as an expert witness in about 20 cases. "There are three categories of witness: the ordinary witness, the professional witness who can present evidence on what they saw or found, and the expert witness, who may be paid to express an opinion."
It is the pursuit of truth which motivates him. "We attempt a reconstruction of the crime from the evidence available." His job is, he says, "hard and getting harder. There are more murders. There were 100 bodies last year which I dealt with personally, of which 94 were suspicious deaths. We'd already reached 100 suspicious deaths this year by the end of September - about slightly less than half would have been murders." Suicides, of which there are about 400 a year, are not part of his brief. In general, there are three sources of information: "The body, the clothes and the examination of the scene where the body is found." The scene is not necessarily where the murder took place. The other sources of information are analytical results indicating drugs and poisons.
Among the more complex cases are those involving bodies found at the side of the road. "You could have a motorist claiming that the body he or she hit was, in fact, already dead, having been killed by a hit-and-run driver. That's when we have to establish the source and time of death and so on."
Forensic pathology in Ireland currently resides in ordinary surroundings facing on to Dublin's Pearse Street. It has an unremarkable blue door, thick with old paint. It does not open. A brief conversation shouted against the traffic takes place through the letter box as an obviously busy woman confirms: "This door never opens. You'll have to come in the back way". Harbison's rooms and small lab are situated at the top of a narrow, college science-building. It's as cheerful as any office could claim. The walls are a dark, but warm, red - disappointingly unsinister, in fact.
On reaching the top of the stairs, it is difficult to avoid the thick pad of Medical Certificates of Cause of Death waiting to be used. A box of skulls resides on the floor, a row of their colleagues looks down over the scene from the top of a shelf.
A Gary Larson Far Side desk-diary testifies to the atmosphere of normality prevailing in the office which he now shares with his deputy, Dr Cassidy. The adjoining lab is equally ordinary, a smaller version of a hospital lab. A collection of small pink slides is laid out on a side table. Those innocent-looking little "pink slides", which remind me of Barbie-doll purses, are in fact human tissue encased in wax. The wax is fed into a machine called a microtome which he likens to a meat grinder. It cuts thin, cross-sections of tissue. The language of the dissecting room never strays far from that of the butcher, the tools, however, are closer to that of the general builder - hammers, chisels, an electric drill. Plastic bags and sample jars also play an important role.
Outside in the hall, Harbison is asking the photographer: "Do I look at the camera or out of the window?" and remarks: "My wife asked me to comb my hair." He didn't. As to the door that never opens, he says: "No, no. I have a key. I must have access at all times."
Virtually on call at any hour, he has encountered many awkward demands such as performing the autopsy on Sophie du Plantier on Christmas Eve, 1996. He had been informed of her violent death in west Cork the day before, his birthday.
Home has always been the Howth area of Co Dublin where he was born in 1935, the eldest son of Austin and Sheelagh Harbison. His education began at Santa Sabina with the Dominican Sisters in Sutton. From there he went to a small private school in Howth run by a Mr Leonard. It looked out over the harbour and Harbison spent two happy years there.
"There were only 11 boys and it was very good. All was going splendidly until the Christian Brothers moved into Sutton and took over. It was a much larger operation and Mr Leonard closed down." At nine, Harbison moved to St Gerard's Prep School in Bray as a boarder. "I remember arriving there in a horse-drawn carriage from Bray Station. It was snowing. It was during the war, well near the end - it was 1945 but there was no petrol." He did well there and, as he points out, the school was geared towards preparing boys for scholarship exams to English public schools. "There were only 55 pupils in the entire school, it's much bigger now and it has also become, as I believe, a co-educational establishment." He shrugs, half in amazement, half in regret.
As expected, he won a scholarship and in 1949 was sent to Stoneyhurst, one of England's most famous Catholic schools. "Not a great idea," he remarks. His memories of the place are not particularly nostalgic: "I didn't really get on with my classmates. I was teased about being Irish - actually, I was called a bog man - so I was quite hostile as indeed they were to me. Yes, the hostility was mutual."
Educationally he prospered under the Jesuits, discovered a liking for classical music, science and did well at French and German which he still speaks and, to this day, can summon up an appropriate Latin tag to suit any situation. "But I made no friends there, while I still know people I met at St Gerard's. No, looking back, going to school in England was not such a good idea. It also meant that by going to Trinity I had to have, as a Catholic, an exemption whereby my parents were formally forgiven for the mistake of having to send me to Trinity because I had gone to an English public school. It didn't happen again, my brother went to UCD." His brother, archaeologist Dr Peter Harbison, has written extensively on archaeology and medieval Ireland. Their mother went to university after her sons were grown and is a medievalist. Mr Harbison senior died in 1968.
During the early years of his career, Harbison travelled a lot between various English hospitals. "Being single was an advantage, I travelled around a lot. I grew to love that south west of England: Devon, Bristol and so on." Wonderful places for sailing. He looks thoughtful, "but my line of work was a disadvantage when it came to going out with girls. Doing this sort of work," he waves his hand in the air, "interferes with your romantic possibilities. It does confirm that one is a bit weird". In 1979 he married his wife, Kathleen, and his twin son and daughter were born in 1981, "about the time of the Stardust fire". They do their Leaving Certs next summer.
The science of forensic pathology is both ancient and relatively recent. "The first chair was created at Edinburgh in 1807, the one at Surgeons dates from 1829," he says before remarking, "but there was also interest in this as far back as the Babylonians." According to Gradwohl's Legal Medicine (Third Edition, 1976): "When Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) was murdered, his body was exposed to the Forum and there the physician Antistius examined the corpse and found that only one of his 23 wounds was mortal. It had penetrated the chest, entering between the first and second ribs. Antistius would seem to have been exercising the right open to any citizen in examining the body rather than any medical privilege or obligation."
Asked if Ireland is a violent society, Harbison pauses before remarking: "I would say no more violent than other places. According to statistics, the murder rate is generally 10 per million - we may be gone to about 12 per million." In a formal interview situation he seldom demonstrates the blackly witty abandon apparent in Donald Taylor-Black's excellent documentary Dead Man's Doctor, screened on RTE last year. In that he distinguishes, with the help of a cartoonist friend, the differences between the English attitude to murder and those prevailing here. "The English favour strangling and stabbing; the Irish the gun, the fist and the boot."
Being State Pathologist, even now with a deputy, is a full-time job. Harbison also teaches medical students and policemen. "Of course, when I'm speaking to policemen, or gardai as they are known in this State, I do point out the most effective ways of murdering, or of committing suicide, but I do think it is rather irresponsible to print such things in a newspaper."
With his heavy workload, there can be little time for leisure. "I don't read fiction, although there is one writer . . ." - it is too easy to guess that Harbison reads Patrick O'Brien seafaring novels. Schubert and Sibelius his favourite composers. "I'm also very interested in steam trains and old maps - and wine." A keen sailor, he used to have a boat but now sails mainly with friends.
He seems content: the definitive pragmatist - moral, unshockable. If he is saddened by the damage humans inflict on others, he is not commenting.
How does he view death? "It's an event," he says. "I don't philosophise it - which is just as well, as I'd probably end up in a madhouse if I did."
The Role of the Expert Witness will be published by Inns Quay on November 10th, price £24.
The first Expert Witness Conference in Ireland will take place on November 25th, in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kilmainham, Dublin. For details, contact Frances O'Connor, tel: 01-6623404.
