Several years ago, when I was making a documentary film about dying patients in an intensive care unit at a Boston hospital, I wanted to shoot some sequences in the hospital morgue and was introduced to the man in charge of the morgue. He was responsible for the autopsy rooms and the refrigerators where bodies were kept prior to their retrieval by an undertaker. He was a pleasant, straightforward man who had been the administrator of the morgue for many years. I explained to him that I wanted to follow the procedure of the nurses who came to the dead patient’s room, loaded the body on a gurney, and transported it to the morgue. I was particularly interested in how the corpse was concealed from visitors and patients on the trip. I needed his permission to shoot in the morgue and he quickly agreed. A few days later I happened to be in a patient’s room when she died. After the nurses lifted the body onto the gurney and artfully concealed the corpse with sheets hanging over the side, I followed the three nurses from the eleventh-floor intensive care unit to the basement morgue, where they placed the cadaver in a refrigerator unit. I followed this procedure several times and was present on occasion when an undertaker came to claim a body.
One day I was invited to a “death conference.” This was a regular meeting where the attending doctors would compare a diagnosis made when a patient was alive with the cause of death as determined by the autopsy. This conference was a regular part of the teaching program of the hospital. By the time I was invited to this conference my hypochondria was pretty much under control, since we had already been working at the hospital for several weeks. However, I was still slightly dismayed to see the liver, heart, kidneys, and pancreas on exhibit as I struggled to understand the technical scientific debate among the doctors as to the actual cause of death. I was also aware of the ease with which I accepted the routines surrounding death and how quickly I became accustomed to seeing dead people and their displayed body parts.
After six weeks at the hospital, the shooting of the film was over and I made the rounds to say goodbye to the staff physicians, nurses, administrators, and others who had assisted me and offered suggestions during the filming. I went down to the morgue to look for the man who had been so helpful and could not find him. I decided to write to him and went up to the hospital cafeteria for a farewell lunch with some members of the staff. Toward the end of lunch I saw the man from the morgue at another table and walked over and thanked him for his help. He smiled, shook my hand and said, “See you soon.”
Frederick Wiseman is a filmmaker whose most recent films are The Last Letter, Domestic Violence, and Domestic Violence 2.
