What is the meaning given to the human body by the physicians? Is the position of physicians in itself different from that of biologists and physical anthropologists? For both pathologist and forensic practitioner, used to work on human remains or fragments, the aim is to define very precisely their subject of study. What is the body? What are its different meanings (in relation with its content, with the notion of person, or the notion of human being)? A body with soul or without it? The inert or the living? The corporeal or incorporeal? According to our practice, disturbing cultural elements may originate in three practical proposals.

First (mono-disciplinary) proposal: the autopsy is a technical act, a science of the technique. The dead is fully disembodied, considered an inert thing, a simple object of study, a transition on the path of organic recycling. The body is no longer a person or the union of flesh and soul, according to the technician view of the body (including a dead one), i.e. a Auguste Comte’s positivist position mixed with a René Descartes’ mechanistic consideration.

When one is a scientist, he does not take into consideration any metaphysical meaning concerning the dead body. It is forbidden to have any feeling towards a cadaver, for the sake of full objectivity. From the very beginning, medicine was wanted to be scientific (especially anatomy teaching and forensic medicine, fulltime dealing with cadavers). Medicine is a discipline of evidence, which cannot be anything else but objective, technical, definitive, cautious.

This confrontation between medical practices (focused on the corpse, with a pure, hard, and relentless scientific logic) within different populations, and various samples (autopsy technique versus personal or social body representations/visions) raises problems of acceptability who then can lead major refusal of autopsies.

Second (multi-disciplinary) proposal: the dead body is reminiscent of the society of its time. It acquires different meanings depending on the cultures, beliefs, geographical localizations [1].

The dead body (and its main study tool, forensic medicine/science), and subsequent sampling of human cadavers are affected by the law, society, and modern bioethics (with adverse effects at the origin of a net reduction in incidence of autopsies).

The autopsy is not a technique. The goals are enormous. Medicine was balanced by techniques that were clear of emotions in favor of results, interpreting the body on a scientific and evolutionary level. Did not medicine affect the body up to dematerialize humans? This profusion of autopsy techniques and complementary exams (postmortem imagery, toxicology, biochemistry, etc.) finally gave sense to the dead body that has to be regulated (i.e. respect for the human cadaver as enacted by laws of bioethics): the human body has to be reintegrated within the chain of the living and the dead.

What makes a dead body? A head is not just a head, the same for a leg, a heart, or for any other organ; these segments are also a part of a group (humanity). When there is no more than this left from a human body, this part substitutes fully the whole body. The individual has to be reintegrated within the community, even dead this person has to be respected, honored (even post-mortem), his remains must stay “sacrosanct”, and all this without any systematic underlying religiosity [2].

Third (inter-disciplinary) proposal: is autopsy really “the Queen of knowledge”? Is autopsy strictly medical (the physician being at the head of the operations) or does-it belong to allied sciences or criminology (the attorney, or, at least, the Justice being then placed at the head)?

Why a physician carries out an autopsy rather than a simple technician? We need to give back a medical meaning to the dead body as an object of study. The autopsy must remain a pure medical act, but what exact signification is to give to the autopsy? What is to look for in a dead body?

Is it a coincidence that there are so few autopsies? Could it be, for example, in order to cover medical errors, which we know they exist roughly in a third of all deaths [3]?

How can this technique (of scientific body opening and examination) persist, as the autopsy currently dies? Because it remains “pure, virgin”, without any evolution (rigidity of the practices, comparable with the ones from the Virchow’s period) [4]? Because an ethical reflection is necessary for the actors of the dead body (physicians and especially medical examiners, funeral workers, anthropologists), based on a lucid analysis of this practice [5-7]? Anthropology, sociology, philosophy, religion, etc. can improve the insight and efficiency of the physician in his interventions, giving a “body” to the dead body throughout the humanities and social sciences.

Autopsies cannot remain isolated and only be a technique or a tool, even a vanishing one [8], since it touches on “something” which is anything but a thing (the human body, even dead).

Without this reflection destined to moralize the practices, the autopsy technique will leave hospitals and drown into the applied and/ or forensic sciences, loosing at the same time its medical character, guarantor of a sincere humanism: a dead patient is still a patient, with all that this equation implies (respect, support, restraint, modesty, etc.). It is in medicine’s interest to have this ethical reflection, as the autopsies’ practitioner judge the effectiveness of his peers through the opening of their patients’ bodies. More, do physicians (and attorneys) no longer accept any medical errors? We are in high-risk medicine, with a victimization of people in comparison with the technique. In practice, how do the technical elements have changed, based on this reflection and their use in society? The entire technical dimension of the complementary exams (genetics, radiology, toxicology, biochemistry, bacteriology, etc.) is in opposition with the act of autopsy and all that it stands for; this practice has a true medical and societal status, and focuses simultaneously on the “sacred body”). Improvement actions of autopsy practices may be necessary, in order to moralize them and facilitate their acceptance by population groups who are reluctant to this post-mortem opening of the corpse.

We deeply consider the autopsy (and therefore, the dead human body and, by extension all human remains) to be at the service of the “common good”, following the thought of Henri Bergson, and for the benefit of mankind; the real difficulty of living in society is to build on it for overstepping the marks, open the frameworks, which means specifically to act in reference or in the horizon of humanity (“for mankind”, for the “progress” or the “leap forward”): “Then philosophizing on it [the society], we would compare its organization with cells, united by invisible links, subordinated each other in a scholarly hierarchy that naturally folds, for the greater good of all, a discipline which may require the sacrifice of the part”.9 Could that sacrifice be the non-respect of the ultimate wills expressed by an individual, for the progress of universal knowledge? As stated by Bergson, “each of us belongs to society as much as to himself”, and “it is only fair to take into account the individual virtually consent to all of its obligations, even if he no longer has to consult each” [9]. Based on this, should it be licit to carry out an autopsy and/or an anthropological examination for the benefit of all, bypassing the liberty of the individual in deciding the fate of his own body? Can we consider that only a physician has the capacity of deciding whether it is opportune to carry out or not an autopsy on one of his patients, for the benefits of relatives and the rest of the society? Maybe the autopsy practice could be saved at this price, without reaching to immorality or alteration of human rights.