[ANON POST] Medical Examiner's Working Conditions, 1940s NYC
Setting: New York (Manhattan), 1947
Searched: "Medical examiner" combined variously with "office," "floor plan"/"floorplan," "room," "building," "interior," "working conditions." Tried image search on these, too, and mostly got a lot of pictures of autopsy tables. Also glanced into a few of my local library's books about medical examiners, but (as well as having a more recent focus that might not be appropriate to the period) these were focused on stories of individual dead people, without a lot of mundane side-detail.
Question:
When my character who is a medical examiner is not actually performing autopsies, what kind of space is he working in?
My co-writer and I have, provisionally, imagined a small office space. It
1) opens into both a morgue/autopsy room and a hallway,
2) contains three desks, filing cabinets, a telephone, and a coffee pot, and
3) is used by two male medical examiners and a secretary (or similar female assistant).
Is this roughly plausible as described, or do the placement or furniture of the room, or the number of people using it, need to be altered?
Also, I need the ME character to enter the morgue and/or autopsy room completely unaccompanied. Is this something that might occur during the course of an ordinary day, or would it be unusual enough that the narrative would need to explain it somehow? If the latter, what might be a plausible explanation? (He himself isn't up to anything shady.)
Searched: "Medical examiner" combined variously with "office," "floor plan"/"floorplan," "room," "building," "interior," "working conditions." Tried image search on these, too, and mostly got a lot of pictures of autopsy tables. Also glanced into a few of my local library's books about medical examiners, but (as well as having a more recent focus that might not be appropriate to the period) these were focused on stories of individual dead people, without a lot of mundane side-detail.
Question:
When my character who is a medical examiner is not actually performing autopsies, what kind of space is he working in?
My co-writer and I have, provisionally, imagined a small office space. It
1) opens into both a morgue/autopsy room and a hallway,
2) contains three desks, filing cabinets, a telephone, and a coffee pot, and
3) is used by two male medical examiners and a secretary (or similar female assistant).
Is this roughly plausible as described, or do the placement or furniture of the room, or the number of people using it, need to be altered?
Also, I need the ME character to enter the morgue and/or autopsy room completely unaccompanied. Is this something that might occur during the course of an ordinary day, or would it be unusual enough that the narrative would need to explain it somehow? If the latter, what might be a plausible explanation? (He himself isn't up to anything shady.)