Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 2:15
OCME: Life in America's Top Forensic Medical Center | In conversation with author Bruce Goldfarb
OCME is a behind the scenes portrait of one of the largest and busiest forensic medical centers in the United States, which was once celebrated as the gold standard books, books, health investigations. The institution has been plunged into crisis between an epidemic of opioid deaths, violence and intense budgetary constraints imposed by state officials
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:35
Could you talk a bit about how this particular story came to to be and why it seems so essential to write a whole book about it and what you think we can learn as a country from the failures of OCME?
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 1:51
I am incredibly excited to read your first book, 18 Tiny Deaths, which is the story of Francis Glesner. Lee, who was for those who don't know, she was an independently wealthy matriarch who she had no formal education. But your book details how she revolutionized the field of books health investigations, and she was known for creating the nutshell studies of unexplained death, pioneering the evolution from a formerly archaic coroner system to the modern scientific medical examiner system that we have today
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 1:30
And can you highlight or share anything that may be surprising that either you talk about in OCME and or your book 18 Tiny Deaths? I'm sure everyone would love to hear about that
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:47
If there's another project in the works or maybe a hobby or other interests that you are currently obsessed with or feeling very devoted and interested in, we'd love to hear whatever is coming next or what has you preoccupied at the moment upon the release of OCME in the World
Bruce Goldfarb
@BruceGoldfarb · 0:26
Thank you for having me. Booy. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. As we're getting into our third year of a viral pandemic, and after ten years of an epidemic of deaths from synthetic opioids, we're long overdue to talk about the importance of the public health system and what it means to our lives individually and for everyone. Everybody is a society
Bruce Goldfarb
@BruceGoldfarb · 4:20
I have fairly extensive experience in journalism. And when I was hired at the OCME as the executive assistant for the Chief and doing basically media relations and public information for the agency, that it placed me in a situation to observe the inner workings of a critical statewide agency. And before my employment, I only had a vague sense of the OCME and I knew that it had quite a reputation, but I didn't really know about medical examiners and how they operated
Bruce Goldfarb
@BruceGoldfarb · 3:24
The process of writing 18 Tiny Desks was entirely different than writing OCME. Prior to 18 Tiny deaths, I had never written a book of popular nonfiction before. I had written or edited numerous medical reference books, but not anything like a you know, something that you would, you know, people would actually read. So that was an entirely new experience for me
Bruce Goldfarb
@BruceGoldfarb · 1:20
To me, it's not at all like the show and TV shows. Things take much longer than they show. Even doing something like something like doing DNA for body identification, that can take months and months, up to a year and a half. Testing takes a long time to do. Toxicology the histology, they don't get wrapped up quickly. They could take days, weeks or months before they determine the cause of manner of death. So it's not as fast
Bruce Goldfarb
@BruceGoldfarb · 2:01
Well, I have children and a dog, so the idea of a hobby or some kind of other interest is entirely foreign to me. But what I'm working on is a book that I had actually started before Dr. Fowler retired. And it's a subject that has been of interest interest to me for a long, long, long time, ever since it actually occurred. But I'm writing about a four hour period on January 13, 1982, when Washington, DC
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 1:27
I think it's incredibly important for people to be able to get a behind the scenes look of these kind of institutions. It impacts how we see and think about the world, how we vote, how we try to protect ourselves and ask for more, not only from our states, but also from the federal level. So thank you so much. I have been talking about and sharing this book with my circle of writers and friends who are journalists, and your next project sounds incredibly interesting