So, poking around stuff for this story, in which Molly is a pretty important character. I was thinking of her line “I do post-mortems”, and if I understand my research correctly, that would make her a pathologist. Which… wouldn’t that also make her a doctor?
Yes indeed, Molly is a doctor! A pathologist is a medical doctor with a specialty in anatomical pathology or histopathology.
In addition, I’ve seen some confusion as to whether she works for the police. As an employee at Bart’s, she almost certainly doesn’t. I expect that she’s a clinical pathologist at Bart’s, responsible for doing autopsies on dead patients and donated cadavers.
(It is fucked up, yo, that Sherlock manages to talk her into giving him body parts. Because unless they work for the police, a pathologist can only perform an autopsy with the permission of the dead person’s family. They’re gonna want that body back.)
Here is why a pathologist at Bart’s would not be working for the police: because a medical examiner (like Anderson) is a pathologist who has also undergone at least two years of additional training specifically in forensic medicine—making them a forensic pathologist, whose work is admissible as reliable legal evidence in court.
This is because in reality, the ‘forensics’ part is a separate branch of study from whatever it’s appended to (which is why you have forensic pathologists, forensic chemists, forensic artists, etc.) It means that Anderson is trained not only in medicine but in how to collect and handle evidence, how to document all his actions in a clear and specific manner that will be legally admissible as evidence in court, and how to write forensic reports and testify on them.
I’ve studied digital forensics, and written those reports, and they are HARD, y’all, even for a discipline that’s a lot less complex than medicine. Forensics is the only job I’ve ever encountered that I’m honestly not sure I could do. Here’s what you need to understand about Anderson, and for that matter Molly to a greater or lesser extent because her work also heavily relies on precise and thorough documentation: forensic examiners are utterly badass. Sherlock can mock them all he wants, but there are reasons he’s quite rightly still considered an amateur.
You have to exercise not only excellent skills in your science, but also flawless logic (of the rock-solid step-by-step geometry proof sort) and excellent written communication skills for every single case report you write. Because that report will be entered as evidence, and you will be grilled on it, and then cross-examined by an opposing lawyer, and if you ever fuck up on your data or (God help you) falsify evidence (except possibly if you have Sherlock Holmes to help you fudge your records)-–if anything in a report you write is found to be questionable or wrong, ever, your career is over. You will be impeached by the court (that is, brought into question as a reliable witness) and lose your job. Because a forensic scientist (or, for that matter, a law enforcement officer) who has once been impeached becomes essentially useless as a witness for the rest of their career, and thus they can produce no evidence on a case that can be relied on to uphold a case.
Which, actually, might also give you some insight on Sherlock’s relationship to the police and how they most likely employ him. He apparently doesn’t go to court, he doesn’t handle evidence in a way that can compromise it (if he actually lifted evidence off Lestrade and jaunted off home with it, he would not only never be invited back, but he’d probably be arrested for tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice so fast his head would spin). He does seem handle evidence occasionally, and there are procedures to allow an ‘expert’ to check out and handle evidence that requires specialized work, but that’s weird because the expert can then generally be expected to end up testifying about their work and findings in court. But mainly, he appears to be a very behind-the-scenes player, so he’s probably more often consulted to help the police get pointed in the right direction than to do significant investigating of his own (with, perhaps, the exception of the more elaborate cases, such as we’ve seen in the episodes).