The Quick and the Dead

Cynric Temple-Camp

HarperCollins

Otago Daily Times, September 12th 2020

After the success of his first book, The Cause of Death, which covered his work on some of Northland’s most baffling and high-profile criminal investigations, New Plymouth pathologist Cynric Temple-Camp has returned to print with a collection of some of the strange situations he has dealt with in his decades-long career. Where its predecessor focussed on criminal forensics, most of the stories in The Quick and the Dead involve ordinary people struck down by accident, illness or injury and cover the full spectrum of a pathologist’s day-to-day life, from ‘carving up the dead’ to the investigation and diagnosis of the living.

Cases are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, grouped according to cause or circumstance into a series of evocatively-titled chapters – ‘My Bowels Will Be the Death of Me’, ‘Shotguns in the Manawatu’ – and draw from both professional and personal experience, resulting in some surprising juxtapositions. ‘The Meat Eaters’, for example, includes both the description of a near-fatal crocodile attack on Temple-Camp’s brother-in-law and an account of a Northland teenager’s death from necrotising fasciitis after an unsuccessful attempt to remove a verruca.

He also reflects on his fascination with death and acknowledges that decades of experience haven’t blunted his responses to the more visceral aspects of his work, creating a connection between author and reader that acknowledges the difficulty of the subject matter involved. This same wry sensibility suffuses the writing. Although he adopts the sort of conversational tone one might use to relate an amusing dinner-table anecdote, Temple-Camp clearly takes none of the cases lightly. Some are of considerable personal significance, and whilst the stories represent some of his most strange and memorable experiences, they are as much memorial and entertainment: each is followed by a salutation for the individual involved, regardless of age, class, status or circumstance.

Although the underlying science presented here will be familiar to aficionados of the medical and criminal genre, it is refreshing to see it from a local perspective. Some, indeed, present situations unique to this country, including the case of Jason Chase, to whom the volume is dedicated. A fit and healthy young man with no underlying pathology, Chase’s body was found in the Kaimanawa Ranges without a mark on it, and his cause of death remained a mystery until a chance conversation with a colleague fifteen years later introduced Temple-Camp to Urtica ferox, the native tree-nettle. Known to by locals for killing animals and the occasional unwary passer-by, it is next-to-unheard of in professional circles or, indeed, New Zealanders at large; a timely reminder that whilst we may be free of some of the threats facing people elsewhere in the world, our country had dangers of its own hidden in the undergrowth.

Another delight for aficionados is the nuggets of trivia scattered like breadcrumbs throughout the text, including the reason most pathologists don’t eat sushimi and why some Russian-engineered ammunition is designed to main rather than kill. There is plenty here, too, for the more gruesomely inclined (I would recommend the squeamish avoid the chapters ‘The Creatures Within Us’ and ‘Earth to Earth’).

With royalties going to the Palmerston North Rescue Helicopter Trust, The Quick and the Dead is an ideal book for anybody with even a passing interest the body and its discontents.