“The dead cannot be reincarnated, but the living can live better,” said Yin Hsin-ling (尹莘玲), the nation’s first licensed female forensic doctor.
Yin last month received a Purple Ribbon Award and a Special Contribution Award from the Ministry of Health and Welfare for her work to help victims of child and sexual abuse.
Yin said she decided to focus on child and sexual abuse after an incident in which she cried while performing an autopsy, realizing that death cannot be reversed.
Photo: Huang Hsu-lei, Taipei Times
It would be better if she could examine living bodies and keep children safe from death, she thought at the time.
Yin’s office is filled with toys and stuffed animals to help ease the mood when potential abuse victims visit her, she said.
Many people refuse to tell the police the truth, because they are afraid of causing trouble, she said.
Citing as an example the case of a female newborn who was covered in scars, she said that the neighbors did not dare testify, because they were afraid of offending the parents.
“Dead children cannot come back to life, but living children can live better,” Yin said, recalling a case in which a nanny claimed that a child had fallen in the bathroom, but her examination proved otherwise, leading to an indictment.
As a mother of three, Yin said she empathizes with other parents.
Yin has appeared in court nearly 100 times for cases of child and sexual abuse, which few doctors are willing to do because of the lower income from clinical forensic practice, as well as having to cooperate with social workers and spend time in court.
Yin became the first woman in Taiwan to obtain a forensic doctor’s license when she was 36.
Now 56, she is the director of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Kaohsiung Medical University Chung-Ho Memorial Hospital and has performed more than 2,000 autopsies.
Yin said she has never been afraid of the dead.
When she was studying at Taipei Medical University, she borrowed human bones, kept them under her bed and waited until it was late at night and her landlord was asleep to draw the curtains and compare the bones to experimental results.
“[I am] not afraid of human bones, but [I am] afraid of scaring the living,” she said.
She could not afford to be scared if she wanted to graduate in seven years, she said, adding that she has never seen a ghost.
Ten years ago, Yin said she went to a cemetery in Pingtung County in the middle of the night to perform an autopsy on a female body.
Seeing the naked body surrounded by people, including several male police officers and prosecutors, Yin said she felt sad for the deceased and requested that she be given a private space to perform the autopsy.
The request was approved by then-Pingtung District Prosecutors’ Office chief prosecutor Yen Ta-ho (顏大和).
That laid the groundwork for the establishment of the first autopsy room inside a funeral home in Taiwan, Yin added.
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