The Department of Forensic Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University, is one of the largest forensic medicine departments in the Czech Republic.
When Masaryk University and its medical faculty were established in 1919, they were allotted the site of the former Imperial and Royal Archduke Rainer Barracks, located between Úvoz and Údolní streets. The architect Miloš Laml linked together the older buildings on Úvoz street, assigned to the Department of Anatomy (1920), with the new Department of Forensic Medicine (1926–1930) on Tvrdého street.
The three-storey building features a simple Functionalist portal, with two half-columns supporting an architrave bearing the name of the department and a canopy. The façade is broken by pairs of windows with faint architraves and simple windows within a communication arch. At the entrance, a striking staircase leads to a rounded connecting wing with an autopsy room and laboratories on the ground floor. A classical, steeply elevated lecture hall forms and apsidal projection into the courtyard. The third floor houses a museum of forensic medicine with approximately 600 exhibits, primarily from cases handled by the department but also from the police, courts, and other medical faculties. The exhibits are categorized by types of injury and causes of death (blunt trauma, suffocation, gunshot wounds, sharp objects, poisonings, pathological findings, electrical injuries, etc.). These include both fluid preparations of tissues and bones as well as various items used as criminal evidence (knives, firearms, blunt instruments, tourniquets, poisons, etc.).
The collection is primarily intended for educational purposes for students of the Faculty of Medicine, but it is also visited by students from other faculties of Masaryk University (Faculty of Science, Faculty of Law) and by students from certain types of secondary schools (healthcare schools, grammar schools, police schools).
The most significant of the many fascinating and rare exhibits is undoubtedly the heart of the Brno author Rudolf Těsnohlídek, with a clearly visible gunshot wound, in the fluid collection.
