Where can I view a dead body in Washington?

Call the coroner’s office and ask them.

If your college has a medical school you could see if you could sit in on a gross anatomy class or whichever one it is that has cadavers.

You might try what @fundevogel suggests, contact a medical school, in Seattle that would be:

University of Washington
School of Medicine
Seattle, WA 98195

Here is a list of UW medical school numbers

Your best bet is probably to see if you know someone or know someone who knows someone who is medical or physiology student there, possibly. Dead bodies and cadavers are former people, not tourist attractions, and coroner’s labs/offices aren’t either, so you might have a hard time getting somewhere to see one, a dead body, that is. Any institution that deals with, or has in their possession, corpses and cadavers generally treats them carefully and with respect so they don’t generally give tours and allow the general public into their facilities just to get a look at a body.

@lillycoyote That’s why I posted the question. I knew it would be hard to find a place so I wanted to see if anyone had any ideas. I will look into UW. Thank you

Dead bodies of people that have died natural deaths will not be the same as coming across gory, disfigured, shot, stabbed, burned, strangled, or otherwise mangled and murdered corpses. Yes, medical schools would be a good place to start, but again, you will be viewing intact and unmutilated corpses not the true grit of homicide.

@Coloma Actually, as I understand it students spend the whole semester with their cadaver. By the end they’re none too pretty. How intact the bodies are really depends on at what point in the semester she is able to visit.

@fundevogel Gotcha, I just meant that if she is interested in being a profiler of serial killers or other deviant criminals their victims aren’t going to be little old ladies from the local nursing home. lol

@College_girl You really might want to find out if you or someone you know has some kind of access. The only dead bodies I have ever seen that weren’t people that I was related to was a guy who had just been killed in car accident and was under a sheet on the side of the road and when I worked at the Oregon Health Sciences University. I was working for a biochemist there, a college classmate had helped me get the job and the guy was her boyfriend and she was getting her Ph.D. in physiology and worked in his lab too. She was taking an anatomy class and had access to the cadaver room and I asked her if she would take me in to see the dead bodies because I had never seen one and she did.

It was pretty weird, all of them, lined up on their dissecting tables, four or five across and maybe five deep, in the room, covered with sheets, with their feet sticking out a bit, from under the ends of the sheets. That was all I saw. I didn’t ask her to uncover the bodies and I don’t know if she would have done that.

Lots of interesting stuff there. She wanted me to quit smoking so one day she took me on a tour of the diseased lung collection the department had. A whole bunch of lungs in jars of formaldehyde, on shelves, and she pointed out which ones, the black ones, were smokers’ lungs. They were pretty nasty but even that wasn’t enough to get me to quit.

You could take a college biology class.

Well I did just find out today that my hairstylists sister or cousin or something is part of the CSI team in Washington and will talk about pulling dead bodies out of dumpsters so maybe I’ll look there.

Thank you

Coroner’s office. Hospital morgue. Medical university. Mortuary college. Home for the elderly. Death is everywhere. Society has gotten good and hiding it.

The only one that’s going to be easy to get into is some kind of medical class at a university.

By in large coroners offices and CSI squads will not allow you in, because the more people who see a body, the more potential for the evidence to be effected or tampered with. (for some back ground, I’m an aspiring Forensic Scientist, taking classes and applying for positions in the field)

You could try a mortuary or funeral home, but I would assume they will be hindered by privacy concerns for the deceased and their family.

If you have room in your schedule for a part-time job, you could work for a funeral home as a “pick-up” person. Unsure about the regs in your area, but in this town, the pick-up jobs were all employed to college students with minimal extra time on their hands.

Be prepared to see some weird stuff, though. Not really a good way to ease into that field.

Are you good and sensitized to gore? Car accidents, shootings, stabbings, blunt-force trauma, industrial and farming accidents, and just found week-old corpses are regular fare in your chosen field. You’re going to see a lot of nasty stuff. Let me know if you need a link or two for testing purposes.

We watched my mother die and then sat with her for several hours. There was never an issue of being able to stand it.

One minute she was there, breathing on her own and blinking a little, with warm hands and the next she was gone. I would have objected strongly however to anyone who wandered in as a sightseer.

Stop and look carefully at road kill…it is free and will give you a very good idea of what happens when the spirit leaves the body, and nature – red in tooth and claw- moves in. Death relaxes the sphincter muscles, for example, and the corpse become very quickly part of the food chain, as it should.

No funeral home would let a driver open the zippered bag to have a peek, I can promise you. The drivers are trained to be careful, legal and very respectful.

In med school anatomy classes, the cadavers are draped and covered just as one is on a table in the OR. The part to be dissected only is uncovered, as would a small area of your belly if you were having an appendix removed.

@College_girl: Have you never been present at the death of your cat or dog?

I forgot about one of the downsides to working pick-up for a funeral home, though. They usually need stronger, able-bodied individuals to do the work, though you’ll probably get paired up to work in a team if you’re new. You never realize just how hard it is to get all that weight onto a gurney until you’ve actually done it. Keeps you in shape, though. I would wager very little else would prepare you. It’s stressful seeing the dead in their element (on the scene), and depending on who puts in the call, you’ll be asked to console the family to some degree as well.

All that said, it’s a nice way to give back to the community. In a weird way…

When we dissected cadavers in medical school the heads were wrapped in bandages to deliberately appear faceless and impersonal. (They were fully unwrapped late in the semester when studying anatomy of the head.) So I’m not sure that would satisfy your curiosity about either bodies or your reaction to them. There are also confidentiality and family consent issues. I’d say it’s best to contact police homicide or the coroner’s office, rather than medical or mortuary facilities. Be frank about your reasons.

@College_girl, haven’t you ever had anyone that you love die?

No i haven’t. My aunt died but I wasnt close at all to her. I don’t really cry at funerals either. Well I did cry when my dog died.

I’m really good at handling gore shown on Criminal Minds. I’m going to see if I can sit in on a biology class at UW.

Thank you for all your answers