Determining the exact moment of death in medicolegal cases is not possible since post-mortem changes of the human body are variable and often misjudged. The most reliable physical and biochemical methods of estimating the post-mortem interval are reviewed and the author tries to find out why, in spite of all the previous studies, which have often given good results, the individual methods are neither popular nor practical in routine forensic medicine cases.
For greater accuracy in estimating the time of death further investigation should be carried out to find a suitable combination of some physical and biochemical tests complementary to the data produced by each method and preventing the rather large error range of each individual test.
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