[Medical function in case of death: a final service to the patient and a key factor in legal safeguard].

The final service a doctor gives to his patients is to confirm death and to comfort the relatives. The unequivocal confirmation of death can, with complete justification, be considered the most important diagnosis so that it must be reached with every precaution. Apart from special conditions in intensive care units, where the guidelines of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences have to be followed with a view to using organs for transplantation, for example, the presence of reliable signs of death must absolutely be confirmed. The doctor who confirms death plays a key role in detecting so-called unusual deaths which require notification even in "clear", non-suspicious circumstances. This also applies to late deaths in hospital after an accident or other violence, where the clarification of the causal connection between this event and death is of decisive relevance. The detection or unequivocal exclusion of an outside influence in the death thus depend on the quality of the medical post-mortem examination and compliance with the duty of notification. The additional tasks falling to a doctor when he undertakes a legal inspection at the request of the examining authority in the case of an unusual death are discussed here only in passing. These tasks presuppose that the doctor has appropriate experience, which is why only official or district physicians from named institutions are accepted from the legal and forensic points of view in some Cantons.