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INTERVIEW After 3,000 autopsies in nearly 30 years, Yoo sees life as movie
Yoo Seong-ho, a professor of forensic medicine at Seoul National University College of Medicine / Korea Times photo by Jung Da-bin
By Park Ung
Forensic medicine professor says life and death inseparable, cherishing moments that make end meaningful
Having examined more than 3,000 bodies since 1999, Yoo Seong-ho, a professor of forensic medicine at Seoul National University College of Medicine, has come to believe that life is like a movie.
“A good death is living a good life,” Yoo said in an interview with The Korea Times. “Think of it like a film where the story is a mess from the start. If only the ending has a twist, people will hate it.”
Every Monday and Friday, Yoo performs autopsies referred by nine police precincts across Seoul from Jongno District to Yongsan District.
In 2024, some 359,000 people died in Korea, most of them in hospitals under medical care and therefore not requiring an autopsy. The cases that come to Yoo are those where the cause of death is unknown or suspicious. Depending on the criteria, that amounts to between 30,000 and 50,000 a year, of which around 9,000 actually go to autopsy.
Of Korea's 54 forensic pathologists, 34 work at the National Forensic Service (NFS) and 20 at universities, each handling roughly 180 cases a year. Among them, Yoo may be the most publicly recognized, running the YouTube channel Deadmantalk with more than 540,000 subscribers.
It was sheer chance that set him on the path to forensic medicine.
“Forensic medicine was the last subject before graduation, and I found it fascinating. The words 'human rights' and 'justice' resonated with me,” Yoo said. “My professor told me that despite the field's importance, not a single student had chosen it in a decade. That made me wonder why.”
Yoo Seong-ho, a professor of forensic medicine at Seoul National University College of Medicine, performs an autopsy in Jongno District, Seoul, June 25, 2018. Courtesy of Yoo Seong-ho
A lifelong reader of detective novels, Yoo found forensic medicine a natural fit. While most doctors focus on treatment and prevention to avoid death, he said, forensic medicine works in reverse, tracing back from a death that has already occurred.
The field he entered in the 1990s looks little like the one today. At the time, there were only around 20 forensic pathologists nationwide and facilities at the NFS were poorly equipped.
Now, that number has more than doubled to 54, and postmortem computed tomography scanners have been introduced in major cities, including Seoul and Busan, bringing infrastructure up to international standards. The expanded capacity proved critical when forensic pathologists were deployed in the immediate aftermath of national disasters, including the Sewol ferry disaster in 2014.
In Korea, when someone dies from an external cause or when the cause is unknown, a detective and a doctor arrive together to conduct an inquest. The detective then submits a report to a prosecutor, who decides whether to seek a warrant from a judge.
Once the warrant is issued, the case goes back to police and the autopsy is carried out. When detectives arrive with the body and warrant, Yoo listens to their preliminary findings before beginning. The procedure takes one to two hours, after which he delivers his findings to the detective.
Nearly three decades at the autopsy table have sharpened Yoo's sense of how his own life should be lived. “The word 'autopsy' traces back to Latin, a compound meaning 'to see myself after the soul has departed. In other words, it's a preview of who I will one day be.”
Yoo said most people spend more than two weeks in a coma before death. In the brief moments of consciousness that sometimes break through, a kind of reel plays, and it is one's own life, he believes, that determines whether it was enough.
“Thoughts of your mother, the moment you got into university, a friend you laughed with, your wife and children. If those images come to you and you feel 'this was enough,' that is a good death, and a good life.”
His profession means spending more time with the dead than the living. It may look difficult from the outside, but he has never once thought about quitting.
“I am the last doctor the people I meet will ever have. There is no other doctor for them now, so I feel I should look carefully and listen well. In that sense, I think I have a good job.”