Autopsy report as novel intro? How?

You can find some public autopsy reports on autopsyfiles.org and use that as a starting point. If there are any famous real life cases that resemble the scenario from your story, you might be able to find a relevant one here.

Edit: You can also look up sample autopsy reports from medical schools. I was able to find these two PDFs on a quick search.

As for deciphering it, I would use an LLM like ChatGPT for it because this is precisely the sort of use case I've found it helpful in when there is a lot of information I would have to manually research from a dense text. Once you get a simplified version from it or ask it any question, whatever you get from it, you can double-check independently. I've used it recently to decipher some financial jargon and it worked well for that.

Also, congratulations on figuring out the format for your introduction! It would be interesting to have that as a starting point, and I've struggled with some unconventional formats for some fiction myself, so I know how it can be sometimes a long-winded process to figure out what works best for your project.

If you're just writing the dialogue of someone delivering an autopsy report (like a coroner would to a detective), then you could watch a bunch of detective shows and movies for inspiration.

If you're trying to write and format the autopsy report itself, then I think it would be best to acquire a bunch of real autopsy reports and read them. After you've read a lot of them, and have a good understanding of their structure and terminology, you can put together your own.

The first step in building your own autopsy report is to (I guess) figure out how your subject died, and what evidence of their cause of death should be evident on the body, or at the scene of their death. What isn't on the report might be more important than what is.

For example, if you're writing a detective story about a woman who was murdered, the autopsy report might mention the extensive list of jewelry that was found on the victim's body. You don't have to say "none of the victim's jewelry was taken" because it's reasonable for the reader and the detective to make that assumption, if you tell them the victim still had a bunch of jewelry on her.

But then later, it turns out the victim always wore a sapphire necklace, which was missing from her body, and so must have been taken by the killer. Now you've got a major clue the detective can use to track down the killer.

So like I said, the things the report doesn't say might end up being more important to the story than the things it does.

I did a quick search online and found two YouTube videos reading the autopsy reports of famous deaths:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRVpuqm1JSM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oqEp63duIc

And there seem to be entire websites dedicated to such a thing:

https://www.autopsyfiles.org

I would definitely recommend finding a way to pull and read autopsy reports for "regular people" who aren't celebrities though, especially reports for deaths similar to whatever happens in your story.

The first sentence of a book should make the reader want to move to the second. First paragraph should cause them to want to finish the page. Finishing that first page should encourage them to turn it and keep reading. If those three firsts can't get that page turned, you have lower odds of them reading your book.

So accuracy and all that should be secondary to making for an interesting scene.

What story thing has to happen in this scene? Is it nothing more than "someone died?" Or, is it "someone died in a weird way?" Those are the two most obvious things I can think of. A third might be "this coroner is an interesting person."

The first two don't necessarily have to happen at work, during the autopsy. There are lots of ways to establish death or weird death. The third doesn't really necessarily have to happen at work either. The coroner could (insert character building stuff) that establish (coroner's interesting weirdness) that might not need work, the autopsy.

But all that aside (though, seriously, the three firsts and turning the page are ignored at your peril), accuracy doesn't matter. The goal isn't to make some coroner reading it jump up and shout "yes, finally, perfect accuracy, it's like I was in the room cutting that body open." The goal is an interesting scene. Casually interesting. You're writing a story, not a textbook.

Casual doesn't have to mean it's one hundred percent absolutely wrong in every detail. It just means it only has to look good. Again, story, not textbook.

I would imagine, whatever the actual goal of that scene is, whatever purpose it serves for your story, doesn't require perfect accuracy. It's just a setting. Why? There are lots of reasons why a scene might be set during an autopsy. Those other reasons are probably more important for the scene than perfect autopsy accuracy.

You can go a long, long way with strong storytelling. And background stuff can be managed with just one or two solid details. Audiences have imaginations. It's the most powerful tool a storyteller has. Inviting the audience to fill in the blanks.

They love doing that. It makes them feel connected. Because whatever they come up with, they usually like it. After all, they made it. It's why some people get so invested in mysteries, and get so bent out of shape when their solution turns out different from whatever the author came up with. They liked their idea more.

Give them one or two things that feel right, that feel good, and they take over. They go "oh, autopsy, got it." And in their heads, they're filling stuff in even if you don't. Like they might imagine the room's really cold, or quiet. Maybe it smells weird. And so on. Stuff that helps the story you're telling. But mostly, they take that setting and move on with your story.

How does every TV coroner scene go? Some coroner with a tape recorder going "This is X and I'm in Y's morgue, patient Z died of Z1 and Z2 circumstances, beginning examination." Then we smash cut to that same coroner facing off against (detectives/PI/boss/secret government agents/whoever) going "and then I found something weird."

Who really wants the squish and gush of an autopsy? Not most readers. Even most horror fans don't. They want good story. They want it interesting. Anyone who wants to feel the blood and smell the intestines probably already got a job in a morgue. Everyone else, they might be reading a book. It could be yours.

Every scene is a reason they might stop. Find reasons for each scene that'll keep them reading. And get those reasons front and center soonest.

It sounds as though you might have a similar writing process to me. I have an idea for a scene about a subject I don’t really know. I do enough research to get a handle on it, write the scene, and then take my scene to an expert in that field. I find it’s much easier to get them to correct my mistakes than talk in a general way about their field that I can then build a scene into.

So my research is basically reversed. Go ahead and guess what an autopsy report looks like after your initial research. Then use that effort to make a connection with an actual medical examiner or coroner.