The coroner can in no case hold an inquest except upon view of the body. This is jurisdictional and cannot be waived by any one. He is not bound to hold an inquest before burial of the body takes place. When it has been buried, and he believes an inquest necessary, he is vested with authority to have the body disinterred and hold his inquest, and if necessary direct a post-mortem examination to be made, but after having done so, he must cause it to be reburied.[523] Deep interests are involved in the proper discharge of the duties of coroners; the character, liberty, and perhaps the life of a citizen accused of crime on the one hand, and on the other the aiding of public justice in establishing the guilt and securing the punishment of the actual criminal. Many of the questions which fall within the scope of a coroner’s inquisition are of an intricate and most perplexing character, a correct solution of which can only be arrived at by minds the best instructed and habituated to their investigation. In many cases some of these questions can be satisfactorily settled by the evidence of persons having cognizance more or less direct of the facts; in others, however, they can only be solved by the facts deduced from pathological anatomy, and other circumstances connected with the dead body, the cause of the extinction of life in which is the subject of the inquest. _In Massachusetts Office of Coroner Abolished._—Indeed, in Massachusetts the office of coroner was abolished in 1877, and the governor was invested with power, and it is his duty, to appoint, by and with the advice and consent of the council, able and discreet men, learned in the science of medicine, to be medical examiners, whose duties are to make examinations as provided in the statute upon the view of the dead bodies of such persons only as are supposed to have come to their death by violence.[524]