OCME

Life in America's Top Forensic Medical Center

By: Bruce Goldfarb

Narrated by: Adam Barr

Bruce Goldfarb spent ten years with Maryland's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, where every sudden or unattended death in the state is scrutinized.

Touching on numerous scandals, including Derek Chauvin's trial for the murder of George Floyd and the tragic killing in police custody of Freddie Gray, Goldfarb pulls back the curtain on a pioneer institution in crisis.

Medical examiners and the investigators and technicians who support them play vital roles in the justice and public health systems of every American community. During Goldfarb's time with the Maryland OCME, opioid-related deaths contributed to a significant increase in their workload. Faced with a chronic shortage of qualified experts and inadequate funding, their important and fascinating work has become more challenging than most people could ever imagine.

The public gets a skewed view of the relationship between police and medical examiners from procedural crime dramas, Bruce Goldfarb writes of his work inside one of America's most storied forensic centers. We aren't on the same team . . . We aren't on any team. The medical examiner's sole duty is to the deceased person. We speak for the dead.

©2023 Bruce Goldfarb (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Great information.

Thank you for giving us a look behind the curtain. The service of the OCME is essential to lives.

Amazing and intriguing

I loved listening to this book and binged over the course of 2 days. Interesting, funny and infuriating, Goldfarb brings to life what it was like at the peak of the OCME and it’s decline. Bringing together the history of the OCME and of Baltimore, this book weaves together a story to explain the current state of the medical examiners office and its intersection with current events and high profile cases. Highly recommend!

OCME in Crisis

Excellent account of the history of the OCME in Maryland! A sad state of affairs of recent years.

Love squared

Full transparency: the author of this book, Bruce Goldfarb, is my husband. I loved this book! I remained engaged snd empathetic throughout. Fast-paced and enriching.

Very little of this book is about the medical aspects of death investigations or the actual autopsy process

The author is not, as I had assumed, a medical examiner or physician but instead a journalist who once worked as the executive assistant to the Chief Medical Examiner. The book spends very little time on the medical aspects of the various autopsies or describing medical findings, instead focusing on the history of the OCME and the politics of various high-profile cases. It spends much more time on the author’s interactions with various journalists who were writing articles about cases and how wrong he thinks they are than it does on the autopsies or findings of the medical examiner. If you’re looking for a book focused on the medical or forensic aspects of a Medical Examiner’s job, Working Stiff by Judy Melinek or The Cause of Death by Cynric Temple Camp are written by physician pathologists and will be much more interesting. I thought this book would be along those lines and was quite disappointed with OCME.