Critical skills for medical examiners

[Dr. Fowler]: Critical skills to be a medical examiner are, I think, really a very open mind, the ability to think laterally is probably one of the most important issues, and then to be able to hold a reasonably large database of information that you've gathered from both reading the books, other people's experiences and your own observations. The reason that lateral thinking is somewhat important is that people manage to do the strangest things either to themselves or to each other. On any given day what you see may well be similar to what you've seen in the past, but not exactly the same. Therefore the ability to extrapolate from what you've seen in the past and to make those appropriate links is very, very important.