Female Pathologist Posts Grisly Autopsy Photos To Instagram To Educate People About Death

It's not all carefully crafted selfies and filtered photos of avocado on toast on Instagram. It might seem that way, but there are plenty of people using it for other means. Sometimes grisly means. Like for posting awesome but bloody DIY horror FX or take pathologist Nicole Angemi, who uses the social media platform to educate the masses about the gruesome business of death.

Angemi became a pathologist assistant when she was 24, she's now 36 and has performed thousands of autopsies. "People ask how I cope working among the dead every day. I just have the ability to disconnect my feelings." she writes in an article for The Mirror. "There have been times when I’ve got upset, though. A car accident with family members the same age as mine springs to mind because that could so easily happen to any of us. Another time was an autopsy I performed on a woman my age. She’d just given birth and the cause of death was down to something the doctors had missed."

But she also says how rewarding it can be when you find out how someone dies, saying she takes comfort that through her work she can let the deceased's loved ones know that they didn't suffer, or that there was nothing they could do, so not to blame themselves.

As to why she posts pictures from her day job to Instagram, she explains:

I use my Instagram account to highlight how people die. I post pictures on smoking, alcohol, obesity. My personal passion is smoking: mouth cancer, jaw cancer, pancreatic cancer.

I can see how someone has lived their life. I want people to see the consequences. This is real and it can kill you.

I have over 600,000 followers and I receive a lot of complaints about the pictures of body parts and corpses that I post. But all I’m trying to do is educate. Instagram is the twenty-first century version of medical text books. For me it’s not about the gore factor. It’s to teach people about death and disease. If you don’t like it – don’t look.

So there you have it. You can check out some of the photos below. And head to @mrs_angemi for more. If you can stomach it.

This patient was hit by a propellor of a paraglider and waited HOURS to seek medical attention. This is his wound. He partially ripped his scalp from his skull. Men... This is totally the type of injury my dad would blow off as well.

You are looking at a person who just had the top of his head sliced off with a machete. **this is a joke-I was trying to get you anatomically oriented. A knife could never do this. This is a precise dissection of a cadaver after death to show the brain, skull and scalp from this view- which is called the axial or transverse plane

Sausage anyone????? Ischemic or dead bowel. This happens when there is a lack of oxygenated blood to the small bowel. This is a surgical emergency and needs to be removed if the bowel is dead. You can live without a very large portion of your small bowel.

I don't have to tell you guys this is a foot right!!!! This foot has gangrene and had a previous amputation of the second toe. This was done as a first measure to save the patients leg. As you can see, this didn't work as we often see and the gangrene remains at the amputation site. This is because healthy oxygenated blood is not getting to the site to heal it. Also- infection has occurred in the site that is extending into the bone called osteomyelitis. Because of the poor blood supply, it is hard for the IV antibiotics to get to this site to kill the bacteria and do its job. So they insert these antibiotic beads. Think of these beads as industrial strength Neosporin that you apply to a cut to try to heal the infection. They are applied as a last effort to save the foot but as you can see in this case it isn't working and this patient had to receive an amputation.

Motorcycle accident. Severe leg trauma. Leg was able to be saved with surgery/ skin grafting.

Gallstones in the news!!! As you can imagine, as soon as any story involving gallstones hit the news many of my followers forwarded it to me. The story is that almost 12,000 (11,590) gallstones were surgically removed from a 51yr old female laparoscopy, possible setting a new world record. This was performed in Kolkata, India. Honestly, I'm not super impressed. I have opened thousands of gallbladders in my career that have been packed like this and I'm sure many other PA's and pathologists have too. My friends and I call them bean bag gallbladders because they literally feel like a bean bag before you open them up. Never in a million years did I think there was a contest to count the greatest number of gallstones!!!! Haha!!!! In a case like this I would just use the word "multiple" to describe the number. When I read this story, my first question was- who the hell sat there and counted out 11,590 gallstones!!???

Have you ever heard of someone having a metal plate in their head? Well this is what it looks like!!!! This is actually an extreme case from a motor vehicle accident where the patient had so many skull fractures these 2 large plates had to be placed under the scalp to keep their skull in place!!! The skin of the scalp is pulled down over the face, similar to what we do at autopsy, the plates are placed and actually screwed into the skull bone and then the skin is reflected back and sewn or stitched into places. Good as new!

Mystery diagnosis!!!!! Bonus question for all you smarty pants: What pathology in the brain is associate with the disease seen in this photo?

Fire deaths!!! One of the most common questions surround a fire death is "Were they alive during the fire?". On a forensic fire death examination, a person can be burned all various degrees, but an autopsy in some degree is always performed depending on how much soft tissue is left. If possible, the larynx and trachea or windpipe attached to the tongue is dissected out as seen in the right photo. On examination of this organ block, if soot is seen, as seen in this photo, that means the person WAS breathing and alive during the fire and died as a result of the fire either from smoke inhalation or being burned to death. If soot is not seen, it means the person was dead prior to the fire being started.

Before/after of a large frontal head wound from a woman who fainted (unknown reason) in the shower and hit her face on a metal soap dish built into the wall. Thankfully this was her only injury and 56 stitches later she is good as new.

Motorcycle accident victim. This patient WAS wearing a helmet with no face shield. He flew off bike, and hit his face on a guardrail on the way down. Shockingly he was awake when paramedics arrived at the scene. This story has a happy ending and the patient lived.