Forensic pathologist Philippe Boxho likes to ask people “why shouldn’t we laugh about death?” But gallows humor is just one of the ingredients that the surprise literary sensation brings to his macabre line of storytelling.
In 33 years as a medical examiner in Belgium’s eastern Liege region, Boxho has performed hundreds of autopsies — his attention to detail bringing to light homicide cases that would otherwise have remained undetected.
Boxho has become a surprise star of the book world in Belgium and France, distilling his unusual line of work into taut collections of short stories, each one 15 pages or less.
Photo: AFP
Anchored in real life, the writing is unflinching and darkly-humorous, but the 59-year-old Boxho also seeks to impart some of his passion for a little-known, but crucial, profession.
The enthusiasm is palpable as the pathologist described the “excitement of being there at the start of an investigation,” of pulling on his sturdy dishwashing gloves and white coveralls to begin working.
It’s a way, he said of his work, “to give voice to the dead one last time.”
Photo: AFP
Boxho’s observations have revealed the most unusual of circumstances for a person’s demise — like the 60-something woman who had her throat slashed by her son’s pitbull terrier, that she had exceptionally gone to feed.
Another time he established how a farmer was trapped by a bull he did not see surge from the stable shadows. Multiple fractures to the torso and limbs showed how the hapless victim was crushed by a beast weighing in at 1.2 tonnes.
The idea of writing came to Boxho in 2021, triggered by the success of a post by Belgian channel RTBF, in which he recounted three striking anecdotes.
Encouraged, he decided to set down in writing more of the stories pulled from his more than three decades in forensics — which until then had been shared only with students at the medical school where he teaches.
It was an instant hit: published almost back-to-back, his three books have together sold some 740,000 copies, including almost 200,000 for the latest one released in late August, whose title translates as “Looking death in the face.”
“It’s extraordinary for a work of non-fiction,” said a spokesperson for Kennes, a small Belgian publisher that was struggling to make ends meet until it struck gold with Boxho.
In France, his latest book is among the season’s non-fiction bestsellers, with talks underway on an English edition of his work.
’I RESPECT THE BODY’
At a book-signing event at a former mining site in Blegny, near Liege, Boxho drew a full house of enthusiasts.
“It’s fascinating to hear him talk because he’s passionate about what he does,” said Marie Lou Collard, a political science student who was among the readers in the audience.
She came across Boxho via his videos posted on TikTok and YouTube, and sought out his essays to find out more.
In all of Boxho’s real-life stories, dating back sometimes decades, the identities have been changed in keeping with medical confidentiality rules.
“I respect the body I have in front of me,” Boxho said. “It belongs to a person I don’t know.”
“What I laugh about is death and the ways that people die,” he said. “It’s a bit cynical, but that’s the way I am. If you don’t like it, don’t read my books.”
Many of his cases have involved women killed by their partners. Sometimes it is a parent killed by a child — or almost killed, as in one extraordinary case Boxho shared with the crowd in Blegny.
Late one night, a woman entered her father’s bedroom with a revolver, intent on murdering him. She fired the entire barrel at him, and left him for dead.
But the autopsy later showed the suspected murder victim was already dead when she shot him — of a brain hemorrhage that occurred just moments earlier — and the daughter was cleared as a result.
“Criminal law requires certainties,” said Boxho, who argued that defending his profession, whose numbers have dwindled dramatically in recent years in Belgium, is also a way of ensuring better justice for all.
Nov. 11 to Nov. 17 People may call Taipei a “living hell for pedestrians,” but back in the 1960s and 1970s, citizens were even discouraged from crossing major roads on foot. And there weren’t crosswalks or pedestrian signals at busy intersections. A 1978 editorial in the China Times (中國時報) reflected the government’s car-centric attitude: “Pedestrians too often risk their lives to compete with vehicles over road use instead of using an overpass. If they get hit by a car, who can they blame?” Taipei’s car traffic was growing exponentially during the 1960s, and along with it the frequency of accidents. The policy
While Americans face the upcoming second Donald Trump presidency with bright optimism/existential dread in Taiwan there are also varying opinions on what the impact will be here. Regardless of what one thinks of Trump personally and his first administration, US-Taiwan relations blossomed. Relative to the previous Obama administration, arms sales rocketed from US$14 billion during Obama’s eight years to US$18 billion in four years under Trump. High-profile visits by administration officials, bipartisan Congressional delegations, more and higher-level government-to-government direct contacts were all increased under Trump, setting the stage and example for the Biden administration to follow. However, Trump administration secretary
In mid-1949 George Kennan, the famed geopolitical thinker and analyst, wrote a memorandum on US policy towards Taiwan and Penghu, then known as, respectively, Formosa and the Pescadores. In it he argued that Formosa and Pescadores would be lost to the Chine communists in a few years, or even months, because of the deteriorating situation on the islands, defeating the US goal of keeping them out of Communist Chinese hands. Kennan contended that “the only reasonably sure chance of denying Formosa and the Pescadores to the Communists” would be to remove the current Chinese administration, establish a neutral administration and
A “meta” detective series in which a struggling Asian waiter becomes the unlikely hero of a police procedural-style criminal conspiracy, Interior Chinatown satirizes Hollywood’s stereotypical treatment of minorities — while also nodding to the progress the industry has belatedly made. The new show, out on Disney-owned Hulu next Tuesday, is based on the critically adored novel by US author Charles Yu (游朝凱), who is of Taiwanese descent. Yu’s 2020 bestseller delivered a humorous takedown of racism in US society through the adventures of Willis Wu, a Hollywood extra reduced to playing roles like “Background Oriental Male” but who dreams of one day
RSS