Michael Baden, early in his career (CORBIS)

At the age of six, Michael Baden was sent to the Hawthorne Reform School in Westchester County, New York.  One of the house parents there taught him about the medical work being done at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, so he felt drawn to the place and finally went by himself to see it when he was thirteen.  Eventually he went to medical school and his initial intent was to follow in the footsteps of his heroes and mentors, who were internists.  Then by chance, he encountered an anomaly that changed his path.

In anatomy class, one corpse served four students, and the cadavers came in preserved in formaldehyde.  "They didn't look human," he remembers.  He began to work on one that had an extra coronary artery.  It was such a surprise that he asked his teacher about it and was directed to the medical examiner's office across from Bellevue Hospital.  "I went over and there were about ten bodies there that looked like real bodies.  They weren't pickled, and because it was rare for a student to come in, they were quite friendly with me and gave me a good introduction to real anatomy and how organs looked."

His first official paid job was as an assistant to the medical examiner.  By day, he treated patients and by night he went to death scenes.  He claims there was never a time when he felt the natural human aversion to corpses. "I saw why people died and how they died.  I saw gunshot wounds and liver failure.  It was a good learning experience, so I came regularly on weekends and holidays."  He believed he was making himself into a top-rate pathologist, but one day a case came in that pushed him further along a different career path.

"We had a patient who was a heroin addict who had an infection of the heart.  In those days, that condition was difficult to treat and most patients with it died.  We treated him and he survived, which was a real triumph.  Then when I came down that weekend, there he was, dead on the autopsy table.  He'd gone out and gotten back on heroin.  We'd treated his infection but not his addiction.  That made me think I could contribute more to society by looking at people on the autopsy table and feeding back the findings so that lots of people could benefit, rather than just treating patients one at a time.  So I stayed in pathology."

Baden and his colleagues did a lot of work on the causes of death from auto accidents, which helped to demonstrate that seatbelts were important for preventing these injuries.  He also helped to establish how suicides in jails—the most frequent cause of death there---could be prevented.  "We identified a lot of red flags.  It was usually by hanging, so by putting up bars that would collapse under weight and by taking away shoelaces and belts, you could cut down on the numbers.  In those days, there were 35 suicides to 30,000 prisoners.  Now there are less than twelve for over 100,000."

Since unnatural death is more preventable than natural death, his initial research was in those areas, specifically in drug addiction and child abuse, in order to help prevent it. 

Eventually, he would be called into some key cases.