Talking” to the dead is the daily work of the 23 members of the forensic medical team of the Shanghai Criminal Investigation Police.

They must deal with virtually every homicide in the city. The work can be tough, such as in one case involving a boiled head and a dismembered body.

Forensic doctors go to the crime scenes, fetch the bodies — whether from a luxury apartment or a manure pit — and do autopsies in an attempt to get information about the death: How and when did the victim die? Or, sometimes they’re looking for clues as to who the victim was.

The team is made up of medical doctors as well as other experts like technologists. Shanghai Daily talked to members of the team, who have just been recognized with the Guardians for Safety award issued by the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions and the Shanghai Public Security Bureau.

The team, with an average age of 35, used their skills and experience to glean information in 99 percent of the homicide cases in Shanghai last year. The city usually has 200 to 300 homicide cases annually.

“A dead body cannot talk, but they show us a lot,” said 32-year-old forensic doctor Meng Hang, who did post-graduate work in anthropology. “Different ethnic groups have some unique body characteristics, meaning different causes of death may leave different marks on the body.”

Forensic doctors consider that even the slightest clue left on the body can be the key to a case, so getting detailed information from a body is really important.

Take one extreme case from April 2010, when a dismembered body was found in the Pudong New Area. For a week, bones floated up from a stream, while organs and other body parts were found buried in several locations. Finding the victim’s identity was an essential precondition to solving the case.

Although the head was found, it was hard to identify the victim because the head had been boiled. The ears, nose and lips were cut off and the flesh severely shrunken.

The only two obvious things that the doctors learned from the head was that the person likely had some artificial teeth because two of the front teeth were missing, and the remaining teeth were crooked.

“We estimated the deceased’s height through the length of a thigh bone, discovering he was male by the shape of the pelvis, and the age was around 40 judging by the condition of the teeth,” said Meng. “The information we were able to give to the investigators was that he was a 40-ish male, whose height was about 1.68 meters, who had misaligned teeth.”

Those details, especially about the teeth, helped investigators identify the body, making it less difficult to find the murderers.

“Usually a murderer who dismembers a body has very strong feelings about the victim,” said Meng. “Sometimes extreme love becomes extreme hatred.”

The murderers were the man’s former lover and her new boyfriend. The two didn’t want the victim to disturb their life anymore, so they decided to kill him.

The forensic doctors agreed that cases that appear simple may be the most difficult. Cases with complicated details usually leave more clues. Those with a simple-looking crime scene may lead to mistakes. In such cases, a forensic doctor’s experience, or even intuition, can save the day.

“Experience and intuition is cultivated through hundreds or even thousands of crime scene investigations and autopsies,” said Meng. “Just like a surgeon doing operations, practice makes perfect.”

In a case he dealt with last year in Jiading District, a 10-year-old boy was found dead at home, with no obvious trauma. The only suspicious sign was a slight purple discoloration on the lips. Police were not sure if it was a murder since the crime scene was very clean, and the parents of the boy didn’t notice any property missing.

“They suspected the boy suffered a sudden death, but Jiading forensics found the scene inexplicably odd,” said Meng. “The boy’s body was on the floor between a sofa and a bed. Usually a human’s basic instinct is to lie down when they don’t feel well.”

The Jiading forensics reported the case to detectives and an autopsy scheduled. On the second day, Meng and his colleagues found a very faint mark on the boy’s neck. The autopsy showed he also had hemorrhagic spots on the heart and lungs, which is typical of death by suffocation.

“The murderer turned out to be so cunning that he used a cloth when strangling the boy, and didn’t leave marks on the boy’s neck,” said Meng.

The suspect, the boy’s neighbor, was detained. The neighbor had noticed that the family was usually out during the day and that they hid their key under a flower pot. The neighbor had stolen things several times, but in this case, he surprised the boy at home — he had returned early since it was the day of final examinations.

Yang Yulei, 36, a doctor on the team for nearly a decade, said the members had to quickly conquer the fear of being faced with a body, no matter how damaged or decayed.

“We have an advanced medical education, so the fear was faced back in school,” he said. “But it’s true that we see more of the dark side of humans than most people, so we need to be more open-hearted and outgoing to adjust our mental state.”

Although the doctors don’t detain criminals, they do face risks. “When we do an autopsy on a fresh body, the germs in the blood are still active,” said Yang. “So we must be very careful, although sometimes mishaps happen, like being cut by scalpels.”

Decayed bodies are less dangerous, but the smell is hard to get rid of since it adheres to the nasal cavity and the clothes.

“We have become used to the smell of bodies, and sometimes we are not aware that it follows us,” said Yang. “But people around us will ask, ‘What’s that smell’?”

The forensic doctors said their social status has risen in the past few years as TV dramas, movies and novels have started to show their lives and work to the public.

“I’m very grateful that TV dramas like the ‘CSI’ series exist,” said Meng. “We can watch them for reference, while the public can get to know about us. We, of course, would like more understanding from society, but now we are content since we feel respected.”