Snape and Dumbledore on the Tower/ Blood on DD face

[houyhnhnm102]

No: HPFGUIDX 165336

Ryan:

> > Maybe I'm missing something, but how does 
> > the blood on Dumbledore's face prove that 
> > he didn't die on the tower?
 
Ceridwen:

> The reasoning is, if Dumbledore had died on 
> the tower, his heart would  have stopped pumping 
> blood at that moment.  The AK was directed at 
> his chest.  The AK, according to canon, kills instantly.
 
> Therefore, when he was found at the base of the tower, 
> there should not have been a trail of blood from his 
> mouth as the blood would all have settled low in the 
> body due to gravity.  Dumbledore did not, as Harry saw, 
> fall headfirst, and he didn't apparently land on his 
> head.  He was on his back.  So, the blood would not 
> have been able to go upward without a beating heart 
> to pump it to the mouth.

> *if* JKR knows this much about forensics and is 
> not going for the visual effect here.

houyhnhnm:

If the factoid "dead bodies can't bleed" is a staple 
of detective fiction, I would expect Rowling to be 
familiar with that.  I'm inclined to see the blood 
on DD's face as one more clue that events on the 
tower were not as they appeared.

From a pathology standpoint, however, as someone who 
spent years working in clinical laboratories doing 
coaguation testing, I couldn't think of any reason 
why a corpse could not bleed postmortem.

When this argument came up before, I went looking for online
authority to back me up; the only site I found was a little
on the gruesome side and I didn't want to offend anyone's 
sensibilities, but yesterday I found a couple more:

http://www.ncjrs.gov/app/publications/Abstract.aspx?id=237983
http://netk.net.au/CrimJustice/Medical.asp

>From the latter:

"It is important to appreciate that bleeding does 
not require a person to be alive, nor does it require 
the heart to be beating. It simply requires there 
to be fluid blood in the vessels. If those vessels 
are torn or damaged, then the fluid blood within 
them will escape, and this is what is called bleeding."