Hepatic "split lesion" in a fatal electrocution case.

The first recorded death caused by electrical current from an external source was reported in 1879, when a carpenter in Lyon, France, inadvertently contacted a 250 V alternating current generator. Electrical injuries (excluding lightning) are responsible for >500 deaths per year in the USA. A little more than half of them occur in the workplace and constitute the fourth leading cause of work-related traumatic death (5–6% of all worker’s deaths). Medical literature typically categorizes electrocution according to the level of applied voltage: low voltage (less than 1000 V) and high voltage (greater than 1000 V); as reported from medical-legal practice, 14–40% of mortal electrocution are caused by high-voltage injuries. It is well known that an electrical shock may cause death or any degree of damage to various organs and systems; the severity of electric shock injury is dependent upon many variables: type of current, level of applied voltage, duration of shock, body contact surface area, resistance of tissue involved, contact with water or metal conductor and current pathway through the body. The electrical shock may strike the victim’s central nervous system, the cardiovascular apparatus, the skeletal muscular tissue, the lungs, the skin and other internal organs [6]. Severe abdominal visceral injuries by electricity are a rare entity; in particular, we rarely come across cases of hepatic lesions. In this report, we describe a fatal case of electrocution in which we found an uncommon hepatic ‘‘split’’ lesion.