Gunther Geserick

Gunther Geserick (born July 11, 1938 in Berlin ) is a German forensic doctor and retired university professor. From 1987 to 2003 he was Otto Prokop's successor and head of the Institute for Forensic Medicine at the Charité Humboldt University in Berlin. Since then, Geserick has also emerged as the author of popular science books on forensic medicine. He lives in Berlin and still works as a reviewer and author of scientific articles.

Life

Geserick studied medicine at the Charité from 1957 to 1962, received his doctorate in the same year and has since worked as a forensic doctor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He completed his habilitation in 1973 and became a full professor of forensic medicine in 1984. In 1987 Geserick became director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine. Since 1990 he has worked in various academic positions at the Charité (Vice Dean for Research, Member of the Faculty Council, Chairman of the Habilitation Committee). In 1993 he was reappointed as a university professor for forensic medicine. He held this position until his retirement in 2003. This year, as part of the reorganization of the University Medicine in Berlin, the Institute was merged with the Forensic Medicine Institute of the Free University of Berlin . The previous professor at the FU Institute, Volkmar Schneider , became the new director and successor to Geserick .

Geserick's book publications and essays deal with classic topics of forensic medicine as well as forensic genetics, trace research and age determination of the living. He was editor of the German journal forensic medicine and co-editor of international journals.

Geserick worked for a total of 41 years in forensic medicine at the Charité - the oldest and most renowned forensic medicine institute in Germany. Longer study stays took him to Tokyo (Japan) and Olomouc (Czech Republic). Geserick is an honorary member of the German and Czech Society for Forensic Medicine.

Geserick criticizes the sharp reduction in the number of corpse sections since reunification. During the GDR era, around 2,000 deceased were routinely dissected each year at the East Berlin Institute. Today the number of autopsies there has dropped to 500. Geserick suspects that because of this, many murder victims are buried undetected as natural deaths. "Up to 65 percent of the death certificates," says Geserick, "are probably wrong."

In spite of all his professionalism as a forensic doctor, Geserick sees the biggest difference between the early days of his professional career and today in the “inhuman brutality that no longer knows any limits and the violence against the helpless. That a person is kicked to death for a trivial reason was a new phenomenon for me after 1990. "

Works

• With Klaus Vendura, Ingo Wirth: contemporary witness death - spectacular cases of Berlin forensic medicine. 1st edition. Leipzig 2001, ISBN 3-86189-231-6 .
• With Klaus Vendura, Ingo Wirth: End station death - forensic medicine in disaster operations. 1st edition. Leipzig 2003, ISBN 3-86189-284-7 .
• With Ingo Wirth, Klaus Vendura: The University Institute for Forensic Medicine at the Charité 1833–2008. Lübeck 2008, ISBN 978-3-7950-7053-3 .
• With Wolfgang Schüler, Stephan Harbort, Hans Pfeiffer: serial killers in Germany. Leipzig 2005, ISBN 3-86189-729-6 .
• With Wolfgang Reimann, Otto Prokop : Vademecum forensic medicine - for doctors, criminalists and lawyers. Berlin 1990.
• With Holger Thomsen, Holger Bonte, Manfred Oehmichen: Post-mortem thrombocytes in blood, blood clots and hematomas. Lübeck 1998.
• With Horst Bosetzky : Berlin funeral inspection - a quick basics of murder. Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-89773-700-6 .

literature

• Hansjürg Strauch and Fritz Pragst : Festschrift for Gunther Geserick - Contributions to the Scientific Symposium "Forensic Medicine" on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Heppenheim 1999, ISBN 3-923032-11-0 .
• Hansjürg Strauch and Fritz Pragst: Festschrift for Gunther Geserick - Contributions to the Scientific Symposium "Forensic Medicine" on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Heppenheim 2003, ISBN 3-923032-15-3 .

Web links

• History of the Institute for Forensic Medicine at Humboldt University
• Who is who of science