The engorgement of the great veins and the right side of the heart

To the Editor: The chambers of the great veins and the right side of the heart are frequently engorged not only in asphyxial deaths, but also in unquestioned natural deaths’)*). For the traditional reasons, in many Japanese forensic textbooks, however, the engorgement is described in a section of asphyxia with insufficient description of the association of engorgement with other types of deaths. Because of this, our students tend to assume that engorgement is a specific sign of asphyxia, and they often “comment upon” the engorgement whilst observing our postmortems (Fig. 1). To such students, we have been explaining that sudden cardiac arrest may be of itself sufficient to cause significant engorgement. In this letter, we