Mortal remains: Professor Sue Black on our final adventure: death

World-renowned forensic anthropologist Professor Sue Black discusses her career and her new book with Caroline Lindsay, examining the many faces of death and the lessons she has learned from it

Three human skulls sit on Professor Sue Black’s office shelves, two in profile and one looking directly into the room. While some people might prefer a nice paperweight or other cosy knick-knacks, Sue is entirely at home with the skulls – after all, they represent what she does and who she is.

One of the world’s leading anatomists and forensic anthropologists, Sue has led the award-winning Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (CAHID) at Dundee University for the last 15 years. Focusing on mortal remains in her lab, at burial sites and scenes of violence and murder, her work has been crucial to many high-profile criminal cases.

In 1999 she was lead anthropologist for the British Forensic Team’s work in the war crimes investigation in Kosovo, and was one of the first forensic scientists to travel to Thailand following the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 to help identify the dead.

You might think that when someone confronts death every day it would make them melancholy and introspective. Sue, however, is warm and engaging. Indeed one of the purposes of her new book, All That Remains: A Life in Death, is to challenge preconceptions about death.

Sue, 56, writes in the book’s introduction: “We seem to have forgotten who death is, what her purpose is, and, where perhaps our ancestors considered her a friend, we choose to treat her as an unwelcome and devilish adversary to be avoided or bested for as long as possible.”

Neither sad nor macabre, All That Remains reveals the many faces of death Sue has come to know and what her work has taught her.

But it was perhaps her job as a teenager that first prepared her for what lay ahead.

“From the age of 12 I spent every Saturday and all my school holidays for five years up to my elbows in muscle, bone, blood and viscera in a butcher’s shop at Balnafettack Farm on the outskirts of Inverness,” Sue recalls.

Sue loved the clinical precision involved and learned a multitude of skills.

“It was an extremely useful training ground for a future anatomist and forensic anthropologist.”

She recalls her first experience of a dissecting room as “daunting.”

“It assaults every sense and I can still smell the formalin (embalming fluid), a chemical stench so thick you could taste it,” she says.

“It is also an experience that immediately challenges your perceptions of yourself and others.

“You feel very small and insignificant when it dawns on you that here is someone who, in life, made the choice to give themselves in death to allow others to learn,” she continues.

“It is a noble deed that has never lost its poignancy for me. We wouldn’t have a department if people didn’t choose to give their remains.”

When Sue first arrived in Dundee, the

My hope is that when I’m gone it will be my legacy – after all, how else do you contact the generations beyond your own time?