"1.2  Autopsy is a term historians use of the 'eyewitnessing' of data or events by the historian himself, a mode of authorial power. To withhold this authorization is also powerful. Herodotos carefully does not allege to have seen a phoenix, which comes only once every five hundred years, although he mentions the same legends as Hekataios. Herodotos likes to introduce such information with a word like '…': 'it is said,' as one might use on dit or dicitur. When my brother died his dog got angry, stayed angry, barking, growling, lashing, glaring, by day and night. He went to the door, he went to the window, he would not lie down. My brother’s widow, it is said, took the dog to the church on the day of the funeral. Buster goes right up to the front of Sankt Johannes and raises himself on his paws on the edge of the coffin and as soon as he smells the fact, his anger stops. 'To be nothing—is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?' asks a dog in a novel I read once (Virginia Woolf, Flush 87). I wonder what the smell of nothing is. Smell of autopsy." 

— Anne Carson, from Nox (via)