Dr Cynric Temple-Camp is a forensic and coronial pathologist. That tells you everything, and almost nothing, about him. Because he is also a writer, with a talent for turning forensic science into a kind of poetry – and a kind of philosophy. He has just published his third and last book of pathological curiosities: The Final Diagnosis: Obscure Cases of Death, Disease & Murder.
That sounds horribly gruesome, doesn’t it? You know you want to read it. His two previous books have been what you might think unlikely successes – though not that unlikely, really. We humans have a fascination with the gruesome and the grisly and with murders most foul. Still, you have to have a strongish stomach to digest some of this stuff. I do not have a strong stomach.
How do you tell an author that his book made you feel quite queasy? You figure he’s robust enough to hear what may seem an unusual observation to make to an author: “Your book made me sick.”
Saying so just makes him laugh. He has no aversion to making people feel sick. He might even enjoy it. He’s a pathologist. Pathologists, he says, have a black sense of humour. Again, this comes as no surprise.
Here is an example of what might make you gag. He is writing about a colleague, Richard, performing with relish a grisly operation. “I bent over and lifted the quivering haemorrhoid. I looked closely and found the spot I wanted. I was just about to plunge the needle into it when a stream of shit shot out of her anus right into my eye.”
That is truly revolting. He has obviously included it because it made him laugh at the time and makes him laugh still. Oh, all right; it is funny if you share his liking for black humour – and it is impossible not to. It is infectious. He deftly wields his writing scalpel with wit.
There are, of course, serious examinations. He dissects infamous cases – those murders that still spark fierce and fascinated debate. Mark Lundy is here, as are Olivia Hope and Ben Smart. But so, too, is Vincent van Gogh. Did he really commit suicide? You’ll have to read the chapter on him, which might or might not be a murder mystery in miniature, to find out what he thinks.
After Temple-Camp’s first book, The Cause of Death, came out, he ran into a professor of English at Massey University. “He said: ‘I see you’ve written a book.’ I said, ‘Yep, that’s right.’ And he said: ‘I’ve had a look at it. It’s got a reading age of 12.’ And I replied, ‘Well, at least you’ll be able to understand it, then.’”
Was the professor being rude or funny? “I think he was being factual, actually. I was just putting the needle in. We do that a lot. That’s part of our black humour.” By the way, he says, “a reading age of 12 is very desirable. Text books come in at about 18. So 12 is readable.”
He has, by the way, so far donated $60,000 in royalties to the Grassroots Trust Rescue Helicopter in Palmerston North, where he lives and works. He says as he is simply the narrator of other people’s stories, it is right and fair that he gives any money he might make from those stories to a charitable cause.
Fatherhood at 70
Pathologists, he says, are all “unusual”. He announced this with admiration. He admires the unusual. This analysis of his colleagues, and hence himself, arose when I asked how many kids he has. There are three grown-up kids from his first marriage. Child number two, Victoria, who lives in London, has a son who is the same age as the 19-month-old daughter, Stephanie, he has with his partner, Shelly. “Which is a bit ironic, really.”
He is much amused that his grown-up daughter is “very bossy” about his parenting of her baby half-sister. “She doesn’t approve of me using a dummy.”
He is 70; Shelly is 38. I’m not sure what might possibly be appropriate to say about this. I settle for later on quoting a bit of doggerel from Lewis Carroll:
“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head –
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”
Ha, he says. “That’s right.” Obviously, he thinks standing on his head – the equivalent of being a father in his 70s – is right. “It feels great. I mean, I spend my time going to playcentres and play groups and everybody else I know is talking about getting their hips replaced and what retirement village they’re going into. So, I don’t know. It seems to work out for me. I’m still working full-time and am very active.”
According to him, this having children at an older age is quite the fashion for pathologists. He doesn’t know why. Or what this might say about pathologists, other than a fair few of their number are “unusual”. Of course, I immediately want to know what is unusual about him. “Oh, no. I’m the normal one!” Hmm.
He believes “death and humanity is a funny thing. We don’t like to confront it in any meaningful way. We like to pretend that it’s not going to occur, certainly not to us. People don’t say somebody died or dropped dead. They say ‘he passed away’. We say, ‘if something happens to me …’ What do you mean if something happens to you? You’re going to die. You know, front up to it.
“But humanity is, as far as we know, the only animal that actually can confront it, because we know it’s coming. Dogs have no idea at all. They’re just blissfully [going] from one meal to the next. They’ve got no idea of the future.
“And young children, of course, are the same. They just live totally focused on themselves and that particular moment and their wants at that particular moment. But I think that we all have this problem with our mortality. And so anything to do with death fascinates us, even though we won’t face up to it.”
Being fascinated with other people’s deaths might be another way of not facing up to our own. He wants to die at the age of 102 – “With no particular disease. But that doesn’t happen to many people, I can assure you.” He has no fear of death. “No. I think maybe it’s like being vaccinated against Covid. You become immune. When you’ve seen enough of it, you actually lose your fear of death.”
Poet and philosopher
The pathologist as poet: “Below was the glistening, transparent pia mater, Latin for the ‘tender mother’, delicately covering the mysterious, moist hills and valleys of the convoluted sulci and gyri of the brain, wherein lies embedded everything from our intelligence to our humanity, from our piano lessons and childhood memories to our very souls.”
That’s an unexpectedly lyrical piece of writing about what goes on inside your noggin. He is a very clever writer. He manages to effortlessly weave between, say, “a necrotic mush” to those “moist hills and valleys” of the brain. Which is not say that he doesn’t take a wicked delight in grossing people out. Yes, he does tell his gruesome tales at dinner parties. You really wouldn’t want to be invited over to partake in liver and bacon.
His mortuary assistants share his black humour. So do the police and fire people he encounters. “It’s not disrespectful. It is, I guess, dissection – when you are wilfully opening up the body of another human being, you’ve got to somehow suspend your emotional responses. And I think black humour is the way you do it.”
He did his first dissection at age 19.
The pathologist as philosopher: He initiates an examination of the elusive matter of whether humans have souls in The Final Diagnosis. When asked, he says: “You have a cadaver lying in front of you and to actually take a scalpel and open the skin, you know, for a 19-year-old … A year before, I was wearing khaki shirts and shorts, a striped tie and a straw boater at school. But you’re asking: did I think there was a soul or anything in there? I have always sensed that a body, a cadaver, is not an inanimate object. It expresses a humanness that I feel and am aware of. I don’t just see it as a chunk of meat. Call it a soul. Call it what you will.”
He hasn’t studied any religions, and “I’ve never felt a calling. But I certainly feel a spirituality among people, among humans and within the patients … the people I’ve done autopsies on, the living patients and the dead ones. I can feel a sense of spirituality there. What that ultimately means, I couldn’t say.”
Early on in his medical career he decided he wanted to become a pathologist. He is well aware that people look askance at pathologists. People think it a macabre career choice.
How he fell in love with pathology is unusual, of course – as all Temple-Camp stories are. Born in South Africa, he went through medical school as an army cadet in what was then Rhodesia. In his second year, a plane carrying a wounded soldier crashed while taking off “out in the wilds of Africa”.
“They’d parked a Land Rover at the end of the air strip with its headlights on to light up the pathway for the pilot and the front wheel of his plane caught the top of the Land Rover. I was one of the medics who had to pick up the pieces and take them to the mortuary.”
It was there that he got his first pathology lesson from “a brilliant man … and, you know, he put everything back together, not only physically. He put the whole story back together and showed what the different injuries meant and how they fit together and who had been sitting where. I just watched this in absolute amazement. It was the first dead body I’d ever seen. It was the first autopsy I’d seen. He was the first pathologist I’d ever met. And I just loved it.”
Fifty years on, he loves what he calls “the uncertainty of pathology. It’s interesting when you look at people. I mean, some people don’t change very readily. They like things in a fixed way and done in a fixed way … I guess it’s a bit of enjoying the wild card, never knowing what’s coming next.
“And, you know, a lot of what comes next is humdrum, but buried among it are the most amazing things. We have a saying in our lab, where we quote from Forrest Gump. We say, ‘Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.’ And the anticipation of that is just great. I mean, who just wants to eat boiled sweets all the time?”
Have a chocolate on the doctor, then. Another story, involving his colleague Richard once again, is about a man with a pain in his abdomen. After much head-scratching, and diagnostic attempts, a fish bone was found to be the culprit. Richard was triumphant. He displayed said bone and offered bonus points to anyone who could identify which type of fish it came from. “‘A big one?’ ventured a young registrar.”
He writes at home, at his old-fashioned clerk’s desk in the hallway with his two labradors at his feet. They ignore him. He writes, “My dogs have dysfunctional ornamental ears stuck on the sides of their heads. They don’t hear me whenever it suits them.”
Because his slightly bonkers book is so funny (in bits, obviously) it seems about right to end with a joke about pathologists. Of course he has one: “Surgeons know nothing and do everything. Physicians know everything and do nothing. And pathologists know everything but far too late.”
If you ever have to be cut up on the slab, I can thoroughly recommend him. At least you’ll get a joke at the very end.
The Final Diagnosis: Obscure Cases of Death, Disease & Murder, by Dr Cynric Temple-Camp (HarperCollins, $39.99) is out now.
