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Check out Violence and Science. Great blog.
There is a smell to humans that, believe it or not, lingers everywhere. Where you sit, where you stand, where you bathe, where you eat, where you sleep, there is an inherently human smell. The reason we never seem to notice it is because it is ever-present and until it is in its most extreme form, i.e. a decaying body, we never give it our awareness.
Yes, you’ll hear horror stories (and rightfully so) of advanced stage decompositions where it’s hard to keep your eyes open (they’re watering from the stench so violently), but for the most part, fresh bodies aren’t as bad as we tend to imagine. The second a human dies, an aroma of filth and decay does not fill the air; if that were the case hospitals and hospices would be horrendous places.
Imagine placing the smell of a live human body on a dial and turning it up a notch or two until it becomes noticeable, that’s a good way to describe the scent of a dead body. Nothing new is happening to the organs in your body in the sense that nothing is being “added.” When you die, “stench cells” aren’t magically produced in the body that create these awful fragrances, the pre-existing smells (that you never had the ability to notice before) just make themselves known in the absence of constant turn-over.
But if you want a generic, but entirely accurate description of the smell, it’s simply raw meat (well, until you get to the colon, where you have other smells making their presence known upon dissection, but that isn’t necessarily the issue at hand, here). Being in on an autopsy is like being in a slaughterhouse, a meat locker, etc., but with a pinch of human essence thrown into the mix.
Right now you’re probably smelling it, and wouldn’t even know.
