One-room facility: Civil Hospital mortuary to get upgrade

GUJRANWALA: Now that the Civil Hospital has been made a teaching hospital, its 90-year-old mortuary will hopefully get an upgrade that is desperately needed. The hospital’s Assistant Medical Superintendant Dr Sarfaraz Ahmed Khokhar told Daily Express that he hoped that the upgrade would follow the establishment of the new medical college. Currently, the mortuary is housed in one room, with an air conditioner and no freezers. People working at the dead house, who did not wish to be named, said that they could not keep a lot of bodies because there was no freezer. They also said that the bodies started to decompose after three days because of the lack of a freezer. The foundation of the hospital was laid in 1925 by the then Governor Malcolm Helay. According to hospital records, at least 20,619 post mortems have been carried out at the dead house.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 16^th, 2012.