In 1993 the Royal College of Pathologists published Guidelines for Post Mortem Reports.¹ The guidelines may well have led to improvements in necropsy practice but were unreferenced and their evidence base was unstated. They have been used as a gold standard for audit of necropsy reports,² and reiterated in an editorial in this journal.³

Most of the guidelines are sensible but I question the recommendation, in adult necropsies, of routine weighing of organs. Excluding the heart, the weighing of which can provide important information (particularly when the ventricles are weighed separately), organ weights are of little or no value.

The apparent weight of an organ depends on dissection technique and on the accuracy of the weighing balance. In common with other branches of pathology, a numerical result should always be accompanied by the normal range, corrected for the patient's sex, age, and body size. I suspect very few of us comply with this basic rule. However, even if we were to provide reproducibly accurate and referenced weights, they would not be of use to our clinical colleagues, who are accustomed to clinical evaluation of organs, supplemented by imaging techniques in which, at most, a single linear measurement of an organ is given. To be of use, our necropsy practice should reflect these …