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.
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS