If you’ve ever watched CSI, you know that the job of a pathologist can be just as important and interesting as being a hotshot detective. Official U.S. government statistics claim that there were 21,292 pathologists in 2019 and that the number has increased by 13% since 2011.

Perhaps CSI had nothing to do with it; the nature of the job itself can be just as alluring. If you don’t think so, check out these stories from real pathologists who shared the strangest and wildest things they’ve ever come across inside people’s bodies.

Autopsy professionals were prompted by one netizen, who asked: “People who perform autopsies, what was the weirdest/most unique anomaly you’ve found?” From extra organs to giant tumors and bullets in the cranium – these coroners have seen it all.

More info: Reddit

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#1

My dad had a kidney ailment and was one of the first people to receive kidney transplants. In fact, because of the nature of his disease, he had received three kidney transplants by the time he died. He intentionally donated his body to science in the hopes of freaking out some poor student when they autopsied him for a class and kept pulling out kidneys like they were some twisted meat handkerchiefs from a corpse clown or something.

I miss my dad. He was awesome.

© Photo: gamerthulhu

#2

I did an autopsy of a young kid around 10 yrs old who had hydrocephalus and was altho quadriplegic yet retained some of his normal functions. Like talking and understanding, albeit minimally.
When I opened his skull, there was no brain. I was shocked. This was my first time witnessing something like this but there was approx 1.5L of fluid and just an empty skull. The brain was so severely atrophied it was tinier than a golf ball. Amazing how he survived till 10!

© Photo: User

#3

I’ve never performed an autopsy, but my friends (they were 3 siblings) growing up had a pathologist for a father. I was over their house so much, that I became a fixture in the family/included in most of their adventures.

Me and the oldest son got a hold of some liquor one night and got wasted. My father is an alcoholic, and it gave me a bad homelife/probably was a significant factor as to why I basically moved in with them.

We were caught. I was nervous and sad, expecting them to deem me a bad influence, and abandon me, a cycle I was familiar with. Their parents beckoned me in to the dining room, wanting a private talk. I braced for the worst, but Instead they sat me down, told me they loved me, and that I had to be careful with alcohol due to a*******n having genetic components. We talked a long time, and when it was over they informed Me I wasn’t off the hook yet. Apparently they had a surprise for me and their son, which would blow my mind.

The next morning we were woken, and told to get dressed and get in the car with my friends dad (the pathologist). He drove us to his work, where he showed us a cadaver and the liver of a middle aged man who died of cirrhosis. It burned in my brain and I never forgot it. It had such an impact on me to see how alcohol destroys the body.

While I wish I could say i escaped alcoholism, I would go on to have my own struggles. But they probably would have been a lot worse if it weren’t for this experience!

© Photo: Pitiful_Deer4909

#4

My aunt who worked as a pathologist told me of the time she did an autopsy on a newborn baby who was born seemingly healthy but was unable to feed and then died.

The baby’s esophagus was not connected to his stomach, it was connected to his trachea and lungs instead. And the lungs were full of milk.

© Photo: Heroic-Forger

#5

Performing an autopsy on an elderly patient with cardiac valve disease and found a 3 cm white plastic disc lodged in the ostium of one of the renal arteries. It was identical to the disc of the patient’s tilting valve type mechanical aortic valve which was in place, intact, and functioning normally. We had no explanation for why an extra valve disc was present far downstream from the heart.

An in depth review of the patient’s surgical history revealed that many years prior, during the installation of the patient’s aortic valve, the cage for the valve broke while being installed and the disc had flown into the aorta and couldn’t be retrieved. The surgeon immediately removed the broken cage, replaced the entire apparatus with another replacement valve and completed the surgery. We found no evidence that there was any subsequent investigation to determine the whereabouts of the lost valve component.

So for years (apparently unknown to most of his caretakers and even potentially to the patient) the patient had a cardiac valve disc lodged in his renal artery ostium, in such a way that it was non-obstructing and stable, and it was discovered as an incidental finding at the patient’s autopsy.

© Photo: vonGekko

#6

Situs Inversus. Basically all the organs were in mirrored anatomical positions from where they should normally be. So so cool.

© Photo: PaperClipehz

#7

I performed autopsies for almost a decade. The most unique thing I saw was uterine didelphys with a septate v****a. Basically, the v****a split in two and went to two separate cervixes and two separate uterine cavities. The two parts of the uterus fused into one heart-shaped body. I only saw that once.

© Photo: yeahprobablydrunk

#8

I don’t do anything with bodies, but I did get to go to a hospital as a teen and get shown some strange specimens they had. What I won’t ever forget is that they had a spleen in a jar, except inside it you could see a little fetus, maybe golf ball sized? Ectopic pregnancy that managed to implant inside the spleen. I don’t know the odds but it seems pretty crazy.

© Photo: 117Matt117

#9

I worked for the coroner’a office many years ago and picked up someone who had killed themselves by throwing their face on a SPINNING TABLE SAW. So, c*****d in half skull of course and it only got through to just before the neck started. 

Imagining the pain you have to be in to choose that is nearly impossible for me. Like, staring at the spinning blade and deciding to do it. Wow.

© Photo: User

#10

Not an autopsy per se, but back when I was working as a lab assistant, we received something that both the doctor in charge and I were stumped by. After many attempts at understanding what it was and c*****g different sections, I finally realized it was a pretty malformed embryo. The tiny little head still breaks my heart. I’ve seen a lot of weird anomalies and held different organs in my hands, but that was a full human that could have never made it to life. It hits you in a different way.

© Photo: User

#11

Not an autopsy technically but a cadaver dissection, one cadaver had a small extra muscle in her wrist. We had no name for it since obviously 90% of people wouldn’t have a muscle there. She would never have known in life that she had it!

© Photo: Decicorium

#12

Veterinary pathologist here: aside from a bunch of conjoined twins, situs inversus etc, one fun one I found was some ambergris in the intestine of a whale.

© Photo: strewthsayer

#13

Had to do one in med school. Drowning victim. Found a catfish in their pocket.

© Photo: Kharon09

#14

An accessory spleen just hanging out attached to the intestines.

© Photo: mamallama2020

#15

Step mom is a funeral director/enbalmer and had a deceased with a 6″ tail just below their spinal cord.

© Photo: benman5745

#16

A lady had, some 30 years ago, drank draino to unalive herself after her mother died. She lived.
But destroyed her insides. She ended up having her intestines connected to her esophagus as her stomach was removed from too much damage.
What. A. Mess.

© Photo: Paine07

#17

Im a funeral directr and was embalming a old woman who was still warm as she had just died like an hour before… i couldn’t get any drainage at all l but I had the drain tube in her vein, opened up and the embalming fluid was pushing through it didn’t make sense. I started rooting around in her vein and I saw some coagulation in the vein and used forceps to pull out a clot that looked like a tree branch. It was about 7 inches long and had branches from the smaller vessels.

She instantly started bleeding out. She was a great embalming.

© Photo: knittykittyemily

#18

Veterinarian

I had a calf that died out in the field at about 14 days after a couple hours of respiratory distress that did not respond to antibiotics. We were expecting it to be pneumonia, which is fairly common in calves.

He had a double outflow right ventricle and just this little flap of nonfunctional left ventricle, so the blood entered the right atrium, went to the RV, out to the lungs, and back to the left atrium, where it entered the RV through a common AV valve. The blood also left the right ventricle through the aorta, so both pulmonary artery and aorta came off the right ventricle. There was significant dilation of the pulmonary artery from pulmonary hypertension and he developed congestive heart failure. Pretty neat, a bit sad, and very unexpected.

Really cool to see a single ventricle heart in a mammal, almost like a lizard, and wild that he made it to 14 days like that.

© Photo: daabilge

#19

A horseshoe kidney, both kidneys were fused at the lower ends. Another person had a missing lung lobe, so two lobes on each side, instead of two and three (without having had any surgery).

© Photo: notonthenightshift

#20

Horseshoe kidneys ☺️ have seen this twice in my 10 year mortuary career. Huge pericarditis pus build up that was 500ml in volume and bright green. Intestines that had herniated into a man’s testicles. Have seen many accessory spleens which are very cute 🥰 I have so many other cool things but these rank up there. Oh just wanted to add that jumping maggots are a thing, fun times!

© Photo: panowshamwow

#21

I don’t perform autopsies but I know someone with three kidneys that they have had since birth. Extremely rare.

Edit: I googled it before I posted and google AI says that like 100 people on earth have an extra kidney, but according to this post everyone an their mom has 3/4/5/50 kidneys. I dont know what to believe anymore. Would AI lie to me?!

© Photo: PatrickMorris

#22

Once with this strangely pretty cadaver I found a fully calcified gallbladder that looked like a porcelain teacup. Googled it later and it’s apparently super rare and can be linked to cancer. We took turns gently passing it around like some weird Victorian relic.

#23

At my first and only autopsy, the pathologist scraped some green paste off of the magnum foramen of the skull. I asked what it was, and he said, “A vegetation.” I was a h**h school senior at the time, and very very puzzled by that answer.

As an attending radiologist, I see vegetations all the time in vivo now, and I will always think of them as green because of that first autopsy. Except Aspergillis, which is black.

© Photo: User

#24

Not an autopsy, but with a cadaver I got to work on during a brief stint in nursing school, the poor lady had thick black tar in her lungs from a lifetime of smoking. I was a smoker at the time and it honestly led to me quitting.

During my time as a Veterinary Nurse (I decided I wasn’t suited to humans) I got to help with some interesting autopsies in dogs, cats, pocket pets, and even a parrot. I distinctly remember one cat who died as a result of sepsis as her kittens had died and decomposed in her, the smell of her uterus being opened was horrific. Another was a ruptured closed pyometra in a dog, where the infected uterus had burst and filled her abdominal cavity with pus. There were quite a few cancers.

#25

No an autopsy but a human dissection for anatomy class.
We were working on the shoulder area and hit something hard. It wasn’t a bone and made a “clinking” noise.
Turns out our cadaver had a shoulder joint replacement and we were hitting the metal “ball” (for lack of a better term?)

It doesn’t sound like much but it freaked the heck out of a bunch of second year students!!

That was many many years ago and the reason I stopped pursuing medicine!

© Photo: 2018_is_my_year

#26

A massive aortic dissection. The woman’s aorta was enormous, wider than a garden hose. EDIT: I meant a fire hose lol.

© Photo: Anoia_The_Anancastic

#27

Not human, but I knew a veterinarian whose university cremated all deceased animals on site. A pet owner came a few days after his dog died, asking for his ashes, so someone went out and scooped up some random ashes that were there to give him. The next day the owner called asking if it was the nail in the ashes that had killed his dog – turned out they had scooped up a horseshoe nail in the ashes!

#28

I found a junior mint while doing an autopsy. It was lodged in the persons rib.

#29

Not an autopsy but we had a guy die, by David Carradine’ing himself, who had an elaborate piercing. He basically had multiple p***s piercings locked together with a padlock. Wife had no clue where the key was for the coroner. .

© Photo: User

#30

Unfortunately the other interesting thing I’ve found was extra [private parts].

© Photo: Kaito_01

#31

I didn’t perform an autopsy, I’m a med student here, we came across a cadaver where the kidneys were located way too higher than the normal ones, and the spleen was highly distorted in shape.

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