“Come at lunchtime – I’m doing a post mortem in the morning,” says Dr Richard Shepherd breezily. So it is a welcome sight to find a man who spends his working hours dissecting corpses sitting in his lovely garden surrounded by living, thriving things – a large fig tree weighed down with fruit, two hens pootling around clucking gently, a couple of Jack Russells nosing around his feet and several hives in another part of the garden, with a fuzz of bees around them.
We are joined by his wife Linda, a forensic paediatrician. “Why didn’t you put the tomatoes out Richard?” she asks, surveying the lunch table. “Sorry, I was busy – I’ve been cutting up bodies all morning dear.”
“Well I hope you washed your hands,” she replies waspishly.
Who was it this morning? I ask. “Some poor man,” says Shepherd, serious now. “He was violent and there was domestic abuse. His new partner’s son intervened in a particularly bad argument and stabbed him to death. The perpetrator was 21, but there were three young kids there – 10, nine and seven. Whole families ripped apart in a second or two.”
This is a typical day’s work for the man who has carried out 23,000 post mortems to date, in a career which began in 1977. Over the years he has worked on many challenging and high profile cases – the Hungerford massacre, the Marchioness disaster, the Clapham rail crash, the Stephen Lawrence case, and he reviewed the evidence in the police enquiry into Princess Diana’s death.
“My work brings me into extremely close contact with the drowned, the decomposed, the burnt, the unlucky, the desperately unhappy, the murdered… I can be fascinated, perplexed or greatly sorrowful all in one day,” he writes in his new book The Seven Ages of Death.
The book is a journey of mortality, via some of the more mysterious cases he’s dealt with, from babies who have died of genetic or unnatural causes, to death and dementia in the elderly. Each chapter is like a finely crafted detective story in which he expands on the causes of death as revealed by the post mortem, or the hidden reasons that precipitated it. Some are ordinary, others extraordinary: the seven-year-old found in the woods, apparently strangled by her necklace; the corpse of a teenager found in a tent with no discernible wounds, the scientist David Kelly is in there, whose case he reviewed (he has no doubt that it was suicide).
Shepherd writes beautifully, and despite its subject, the book is very funny in parts. Woven throughout is a eulogy to the human body and he guides us through its complicated organisms, describing each like an art critic drooling over a work of art.
It is a follow up to his first book, Unnatural Causes, which was a best-seller. And it’s also very personal. “I was determined not to do a ‘40 Best Murders’ kind of book. I love this job; it’s fantastic, but it’s had an effect on my private life and I felt it important to talk about its downsides – and also, if doctors can’t talk about their own diseases then who the hell can?” he says.
In 2016 Shepherd was diagnosed with PTSD: 30 years of confronting the darker side of life every day had taken its toll. He was obsessed with his job, and needed to step back. “I was lucky that Linda is a doctor, and because she knows the system we were able to quickly move through to the mental health aspects of it.” He took antidepressants for nine months, and he had therapy. “A wonderful lady in Crewe, who lived in a house called Wit’s End.” She made him realise that he “didn’t have to be on the treadmill all the time”. He gave himself some space, took up flying (which he is passionate about); he keeps bees, he mends old clocks. And he writes. He keeps things in proportion.
He has learned, he says now, that “No matter how tragic and sad some of these cases are, you have to just turn off, because you have to get on with your life. I can’t grieve for 23,000 people.”
Now 68, Shepherd has been forced to confront his own mortality. During a digression on prostate cancer in the book, which affects one in eight men, he throws in casually: “I am one of them”. Later he confesses that despite being aware of this statistic, and knowing that his own father had prostate cancer, he had avoided having a PSA test until an acute infection forced him to do so. The result prompted a biopsy, and cancer was diagnosed. He had a course of radiotherapy and as far as he knows, “it’s all gone.”
Then there was the removal of a polyp in his bowel. Then, after falling off a ladder during beekeeping activities, Shepherd knocked himself unconscious. He recovered but a routine CT scan alerted him to a cyst on his liver, which turned out to be of no consequence but drew his attention to the fact that what he’d thought of as a cheering whisky at the end of the day had in reality become several large, not so cheering whiskies. He realised that he was drinking too much, and he needed to address it.
Some time ago he noticed the ‘Heberden’s nodes’ on his fingers, which heralded the arthritis he now suffers from. “I’m not that old yet, but it’s that sort of click – and the ratchet doesn’t go back.” His knees bother him, and one day he found it difficult to get up after fixing a leak in the sink. Here it comes, he thought. Old age.
“The human body is a truly phenomenal piece of engineering. But it changes, and I’ve seen that change first hand. I’ve seen the development from foetus to baby to child to adolescent. And then there is that nice bit in the middle where everything is pretty stable, where we’re active and we’re reproducing. But I’ve also seen that change in the heart – the lipofuscin, [a fluorescent material which accumulates with ageing in the cells of tissue] under the microscope. It’s like fairy dust; it’s rather wonderful.
“But it does mean you’re getting old – when you look at the heart of someone in their 60s, you can see the difference. It’s not the same for everyone, but we’re all going in the same direction.
“But I wanted people to realise that actually most deaths in Western society are not that bad. My father had as nice a death as you could have wanted.”
If he could choose, Shepherd would like to die in his chair, while reading a book. But, he writes, he wouldn’t want to be asleep. “In case I miss what may just be life’s most wonderful experience.”
The Seven Ages of Death – A Forensic Pathologist’s Journey Through Life by Dr Richard Shepherd is available from Telegraph Books for £16.99. To order, visit books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514
The ‘Unnatural Causes’ theatre tour will begin on October 4th – more information can be found at drrichardshepherd.com
