Institute of Forensic Medicine

The Institute of Forensic Medicine is a large Copenhagen institution whose forensic examinations and records become central to the inquiry into Isaiah’s death. Its work initially supports the police conclusion that he died in a fall, but later examination of stored X-rays and the discovery of a missing expedition report show how institutional routines, restricted access, and gaps in recordkeeping can determine what a case appears to establish—and what remains open to question.

Institution and Setting

The Institute occupies a substantial place in the city’s medical landscape. The State Autopsy Center for Greenland is housed in a new annex of the University Hospital, reached by an elevator that passes the Greenland Medical Association, the Arctic Center, and the Institute for Arctic Medicine. The Institute’s forensic facilities include a basement morgue, where the dead are kept in rooms cooled just above freezing. The examination room is arranged like a living room, with floor lamps and a potted plant, an incongruous domestic setting for the finality of the work performed there.

The institution’s professional authority is linked to its scale and resources. A forensic specialist describes a building staffed by pathologists, chemists, and forensic geneticists, with a warehouse in the basement, teaching responsibilities, and roughly two hundred employees handling about three thousand cases a year. He contrasts this capacity with smaller facilities that lack basic research supplies, and points to the accumulated experience of specialists who have dealt with cases in Copenhagen, Germany, and the United States. In this account, the Institute is not simply a place where examinations happen; it is an infrastructure that concentrates expertise and gives its judgments considerable weight.

Isaiah’s Examination and the Official Finding

After calling police headquarters, Smilla is told she can see Isaiah in the morgue and speak with Loyen, the professor who examined him. In the autopsy room, Isaiah lies covered beneath a white sheet, with a small bunch of flowers placed on top. The scene connects the clinical setting to the personal loss that has brought Smilla there, while the presence of the examiner places that grief alongside the institution’s formal account of death.

Loyen tells Smilla that Isaiah died from the fall. When she challenges the handling of the case, he invokes the thoroughness of the investigation: in a case where the circumstances are even slightly uncertain, he says, both the Institute and the police look for everything. He says the examination found no signs consistent with molestation, and adds that the police report’s footprints showed Isaiah was alone on the roof. The Institute’s assessment thus reinforces the official accident finding through both examination and the police reconstruction of the scene.

That authority is also protected by rules governing access. When Smilla asks about the reports, she is told that autopsy reports belong to the police, which formally requests the examinations and decides when burial can proceed after the death certificate is signed. Loyen distinguishes public access to civil administrative details from criminal matters. Smilla is therefore confronted not only with a medical conclusion but with a boundary around the documents and procedures by which that conclusion might be scrutinized.

Routine, Expertise, and the Limits of the First Reading

The description of the Institute’s routine explains how an examination can be both systematic and fallible. The morning after Isaiah was brought in, staff were occupied with other cases, including drunk drivers and Christmas-party incidents; the specialist says he began Isaiah’s examination at eight o’clock. The standard sequence was an external examination, checks for evidence such as cell tissue beneath the fingernails, and then examination of the internal organs. Police were not present because the case was not initially treated as an unusual circumstance or a suspected murder.

During that examination, the specialist inspected Isaiah’s rain pants by holding a light inside the legs. He noticed a perforation near the thigh and then found a corresponding hole on the boy. He acknowledges that he should have noticed it during the surface examination. The tissue showed no bleeding or contraction, a detail that made the timing of the injury medically significant. The account does not erase the institution’s expertise; instead, it shows expertise operating through a routine that can overlook a detail until a later step prompts closer attention.

The Institute’s evidentiary procedures recur in the investigation of deaths connected to Greenland expeditions. Moritz and Dr. Lagermann examine X-rays that Lagermann has taken from the Institute’s archives despite legal restrictions. Moritz is helping without payment, and permits the examination in his clinic even though he normally keeps that space as private as his investments and bank accounts. Their work is prompted by a missing report from the 1966 expedition, which Moritz says has simply been removed.

The X-rays themselves are uneven evidence. Lagermann explains that X-rays are expensive and are generally used to search for foreign objects; no images were taken in 1991 because none were considered necessary. In 1966, however, severe damage and uncertainty about identification led to X-rays being taken, along with dental records, and the negatives were reportedly circulated to doctors in Greenland. The surviving images provide a means of comparing what official records say with what the bodies show, but the missing report and the different practices in the two expeditions leave the documentary record incomplete.

Records, Access, and Institutional Power

The Institute’s archives are part of a wider landscape of restricted corporate and public records. In the basement of the Cryolite Corporation, Smilla finds a low-ceilinged archive room filled with ledger paper and a second room containing map drawers, hanging files, and a long locked cabinet believed to hold drilling cores. Elsewhere in the investigation, company papers are said to have been formally transferred to the National Archives of Denmark while remaining physically in the corporation’s custody, with some records protected for fifty years and personal files for eighty. These are not the Institute’s own archives, but they establish the institutional conditions surrounding the wider inquiry: evidence may exist while remaining inaccessible, dispersed, or missing.

The Institute’s own archive likewise holds materials whose significance depends on preservation and access. Lagermann’s retrieval of X-rays allows Smilla and Moritz to inspect evidence outside the ordinary police process, while the missing 1966 report prevents them from checking the images against a complete written account. The tension is not simply between scientific evidence and ignorance. It lies between records produced under different circumstances, retained or removed by different hands, and made available under different rules.

That tension gives the Institute a double role in the story. Its specialists possess the methods and experience needed to identify details that a casual observer would miss; at the same time, the official report, police control of the autopsy documents, and restricted access shape which interpretations can circulate. The institution’s authority is therefore both indispensable and contestable: the inquiry depends on forensic work, but also on returning to its procedures, images, and missing records to ask what the first conclusion left unresolved.