Casper's Dictum

Banished from the medical community
 One brilliant German forensic pathologist
 Johann Casper, his nascent methods on
 The rate of rot made him a cunning medico-criminalist
 The heady chemical stench of decay set him free
 To discover putrefaction patterns others failed to see
 Internal and external bacteria coalesced
 And illustrated their wisdom in a semi-liquid mess
 Professor of Forensic Pathology
 Disgraced by Berlin doctors
 Misunderstood forensic genius
 Nineteenth century medicine
 Rejected forensics and outlawed him
 Amongst reeking gassy corpses
 Casper hatched his dark science
 Medical examiners now unite
 Bring Casper's Dictum to scientific light
 ♪
 "A week in air-two weeks in water
 Two weeks in water-eight weeks in ground!"
 Ballooning stiffs and liquescent corpses
 Bursting models for Casper's Dictum
 Streptococci and Clostridium Welchii
 Battle for postmortem bacterial supremacy
 Autolytic conversion hosts and breeds
 While putrefactive ooze squirts from the seams
 Casper draped in a rotten viscera
 Popping bleb and bullae sebum
 Navigating the semi-fluid black mess
 Charting decay for his seminal dictum
 He noticed that corpses found submerged
 Decay half as fast as those uninterred
 Exhumed carcasses revealed to him
 Four times less rot than those in the swim
 He penned a text in 1850
 Called Forensic Dissection (naturally)
 His dictum was touted a medicolegal success
 Even Rudolf Virchow was begrudgingly impressed
 "A week in air-two weeks in water
 Two weeks in water-eight weeks in ground!"
 Ballooning stiffs and liquescent corpses
 Bursting models for Casper's Dictum
 ♪
 Sulphemethaemoglobin stains, putridity marbles
 Blood is haemolysed
 The unyielding hot logic of decay persists
 Casper is immortalized
 Before predation can strip the corpse clean
 Casper graces the grisly crime scene
 From waterlogged stiffs soughing their flesh
 To exhumed partially skeletonized mulch
 His ghastly rule of thumb is well known
 From recently deceased to sun-bleached bone
 Forensics and anatomy are hideously wed
 Casper's science of the dead