Hippocrates had no opportunity of verification by necropsy, and Sydenham ignored pathology; yet the clinical features of many but recently described diseases, such, for example, as that named after Graves, and myxoedema, both associated with perversions of the thyroid gland, lay as open to the eye of physicians in the past as to our own.
The first recognition of a disease may be at a necropsy, but then usually by irresponsible pathologists; it is another matter when the physician himself comes under rebuke for failing to seize a way to cure, while the chance remained to him, by section of the abdomen during life.
The great Morgagni, the founder of morbid anatomy, himself set the example of carrying on this study parallel with clinical observation; and always insisted that the clinical story of the case should be brought side by side with the revelations of the necropsy.
A 6 hr. necropsy revealed cardiomyopathy and a heavy parasitical load of this a MALE Kogia breviceps.
The rescue team planned to spend Saturday conducting a necropsy to determine the cause of death.