I was a bit startled by Lisa mentioning the idea of Bob Church doing a
necropsy.  Bob isn't a vet and he isn't a pathologist so he doesn't do
necropsies, by definition.  He does do skeletal analyses, but the sample
size to use for comparisons for ferrets is rather low and that limits
what can be gleaned from skeletons at this point in time unless the
situation is very overt.  It's sort of a long-term self-correcting
situation, though it takes a long time to build up decent sample sizes.
The more samples the more can be deduced from skeletons because things
like normal variations, skeletal densities, etc.  are better known.  If
someone saw the skeleton of a pitcher, a waitress, a body builder, a
clarinet player, or a pipe smoker without having enough of a sample, for
instance, they person looking at them would think that there were marked
malformations: one arm with far greater muscular ridges and certain forms
of damage but no the other, a female (which usually means gracile)
skeleton with pronounced arm musculature -- esp at and near the
shoulders-- despite the rest falling into normal ranges, alterations of
the mandible, etc.  We know that they fall into the normal range for
people, but a small collection size would not pick out that fact.
 
For example: Bob worked on our sweet Ruffle.  What is known is that she
was right on the borderline of being survivable, and that was true for
her skeleton as well as for her soft tissues and behavior.  (Ruffle was
born with multiple malformations and with very limited understanding of
her world.) Bob didn't do the necropsy, of course.  Our vet did the
necropsy, then the vet preserved critical tissue samples which went
to Bruce Williams because Ruffie was so strange that a number of her
tissues were desired for not only pathologic diagnoses -- which only a
pathologist can do and then only from tissues which are properly
preserved rapidly enough -- (and she had something like 8 serious things
going on beyond her handicaps when she died, with about 5 of those
potentially fatal) but for the tissue collection since she was so
unusual.  What remained went to Bob for preparation for osteological
study.  Perhaps I had a better understanding of how such things work
because I used to be student curator of a comparative mammal collection
of bones, fossils, and teeth.  I don't know.
 
It seems to me that Lisa has a good deal of misunderstanding of what a
necropsy is, who does them, who does pathology and what is needed to do
it, etc.  I think that understanding those aspects would be comforting
to her because she would better understand what occurred.  In the FML
archives there will be at least one vet post from the FHL explaining what
necropsies are, and how tissues must be prepared for pathology to be
done.  For instance, tissues can't be frozen or the destruction is so
great that it's not possible to tell cell types as when looking for
diseases or malignancies, the tissues must be prepared while still very
soon after death especially for some organs such as intestinal samples,
and enough of the involved tissue must be sampled (for example having a
pathologist check for lympho in the spinal cord tends to be best done if
the entire spinal cord is sent rather than a small sample).  I hope this
helps.
[Posted in FML issue 3868]