The Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University Hospital is where the official account of Isaiah’s death meets the material evidence Smilla refuses to leave unexplored. Its morgue offers a setting of professional order and finality, but the institute’s examinations also expose discrepancies that complicate the police conclusion that the boy’s fall was an accident.

Setting and Institutional Role

The institute occupies the basement level associated with the Copenhagen county morgue, where the dead are kept in rooms cooled to just above freezing. The facility is clean and modern, and the bodies lie in dormitory-like rooms for their final rest. The examination room is made to resemble a living room, with floor lamps and a potted plant; the domestic touches do not soften the work so much as sharpen the contrast between an attempt at comfort and the institution’s clinical finality.

The Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University Hospital is also a workplace within a larger medical and administrative complex. To reach the separate State Autopsy Center for Greenland, Smilla walks past the Teilum building and the institute, then takes an elevator through floors marked for the Greenland Medical Association, the Arctic Center, and the Institute for Arctic Medicine to a sixth-floor suite. The institute therefore belongs to a network of specialist bodies, while the Greenland autopsy center is the particular office she visits to seek answers about Isaiah.

Isaiah’s Examination and the Official Account

Isaiah lies beneath a white sheet, with a small bunch of flowers placed on top. A doctor uncovers his face, and Smilla recognizes the body by its small frame and large head. Juliane stands nearby, dressed in black and sober for a second day. The scene joins private grief to the institutional setting: Isaiah is at once a child remembered by those who knew him and a body subject to professional examination.

When Smilla asks what Isaiah died of, Loyen answers that he died from the fall. The institute’s work is presented as a procedure with an established routine. Loyen explains that the autopsy began the morning after the boy was brought in, following a busy night of other cases. The examination included an external inspection, checks for physical traces, and an internal examination. Police were not present because the case was treated as routine rather than as a suspected murder.

The routine examination nevertheless produced evidence that did not fit neatly within the official conclusion. Isaiah had worn rain pants, and Loyen describes inspecting them with a light bulb inside the legs. He found a perforation near the thigh and, on examining the corresponding area, a hole in the tissue. The site showed no bleeding or contraction, signs that led him to conclude the injury had occurred after Isaiah’s heart stopped beating. A biopsy needle fitted the indentation in the clothing, suggesting that a sample had been taken from the body after death. The detail transforms the autopsy from a confirmation of the fall into a source of a new question: who had taken tissue, and why?

Professional Authority and Disputed Evidence

Loyen defends the thoroughness of the investigation by describing what a forensic examination would seek in a suspected assault. In his account, such an examination looks for traces including fingerprints, torn clothing, and material beneath the child’s fingernails. He says the autopsy found none of these and points to the police report’s interpretation of the footprints: Isaiah was alone on the roof when he fell. The findings support the official accident account, but they do not erase the separate evidence that the biopsy was taken after death.

The institute’s records are not freely available to Smilla. Loyen says the reports belong to the police, which formally request the autopsies and determine when burial can proceed after signing the death certificate. He distinguishes administrative information open to the public from documents connected to a criminal matter. When Smilla considers filing a complaint, a police official replies that she may do so; the exchange underscores that the dispute concerns not only what the examination found, but who may access and challenge its records.

Loyen also invokes the institute’s professional standards to reject any suggestion that the investigation was prejudiced or incomplete. He insists that the forensic report showed no indication other than an accident and describes the case as one among many deaths handled each year. His certainty stands in tension with the physical trace he himself identified. The institute is not depicted as simply concealing evidence: its examination yields the clue. But access to the report and the authority to define what the findings mean remain controlled by official institutions.

The Institute’s Wider Scientific History

The novel places forensic examination within a longer history of scientific interpretation in Greenland. Smilla recalls French skull measurers who assumed a linear relationship between skull size and intelligence, and who regarded Greenlanders through a racist evolutionary framework. Their measurements unsettled their own theory when they found that Greenlanders had the largest skulls in the world. The episode places scientific authority under scrutiny: observation does not speak independently of the assumptions brought to it.

Other scientific spaces and instruments in the narrative extend this concern beyond the institute itself. On the Kronos, Smilla discovers a laboratory of aquariums, microscopes, chemical equipment, and reagents. At Gela Alta, equipment from earlier expeditions includes an electrophoresis apparatus that Tørk identifies as having been brought by Loyen in 1966, when researchers believed they were dealing with a form of organic life. These sites are not the institute, but they connect Loyen’s professional world to a wider chain of investigation in which samples, instruments, and interpretations carry both scientific and institutional weight.

Narrative Significance

The institute gives the novel a concrete setting for the struggle between evidence and official knowledge. Its cold, orderly spaces promise that the dead can be examined and the circumstances of death settled. Yet Isaiah’s autopsy produces a fact the routine verdict cannot absorb without further inquiry: a postmortem biopsy. The scene’s central tension lies in the gap between the institution’s power to issue an authoritative conclusion and the investigator’s ability to notice what that conclusion leaves unexplained.

The institute’s authority is also echoed later in the distinction between physical findings and what people will believe. In the novel’s scientific and political conflicts, evidence can be collected, processed, and interpreted, but its public meaning may be shaped by institutions and expectation as much as by the underlying facts. The morgue is therefore more than a backdrop for grief: it is the first decisive site where the novel tests how knowledge is made, who controls it, and what an official explanation can leave out.