postmortem

Postmortem, used as post mortem or post-mortem, derives from Latin post mortem, meaning after death. It denotes analyses or investigations conducted after death, most commonly in medicine and forensics, but also in software and organizational contexts as retrospective reviews of failures or incidents.

In medicine, a postmortem examination, commonly called an autopsy, is a systematic external and internal examination of a body to determine cause of death, document disease, and inform clinical knowledge. Autopsies may be requested by physicians or performed by a medical examiner; consent and laws vary by jurisdiction. Procedures include external inspection, organ analysis, tissue sampling, and, increasingly, imaging such as CT or MRI.

Forensic/postmortem analysis in law enforcement and public health focuses on time since death, manner and mechanism of death, and identification. It involves scene investigation, laboratory testing, toxicology, and documentation, with findings used in legal proceedings and statistical reporting.

In computing and IT, a postmortem (or post-incident) analysis is a retrospective review of a failure or outage intended to identify root causes and preventive actions. The resulting report supports learning, accountability, and improvements in engineering, processes, and incident response.