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Another phase of our activity which was considered to be of prime importance in the standing of the hospital and the level of medical care was the obtaining of autopsy permits. Inspired by a first class pathologist who was dedicated to scientific truth and gifted with qualities of leadership, we managed to maintain a very high autopsy rate. The morgue was our purgatory and we were preacustomed to judgement upon the marble slab even from such predestined failures as strokes. It was hard to come up with arguments potent enough to overcome the natural shrinking of close relatives from what they were apt to regard as further insult to a body already battered by illness and death, and I abhorred the prescribed intrusion into the privacy of the nearest of kin to obtain the necessary signature. Once, as I was struggling through the squalid little list of arguments with the wife of a man who had finally succumbed to an unusual form of endocarditis, she stopped me wearily and said, "I'll sign your autopsy permit, but not because of your arguments. I don't care about