Sixteen-year-old Princine Bailey is another year closer to her dream of becoming a medical detective in Bermuda: an S4 student at CedarBridge Academy, Princine has just started her fourth year of volunteering at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital (KEMH).

Princine's dream at KEMH is to pursue a career in forensic medicine. Putting it bluntly, she said: "Forensics is about finding out the cause of death — what went wrong before a person died and the reason they died. I like it because I like to explore and investigate."

At the moment, however, no specific forensic medicine department exists in Bermuda.

Forensics falls under the rubric of the Department of Pathology, which can often turn out to be less exciting than TV would suggest. This is the point when the majority of would-be forensic detectives become discouraged.

Not Princine, from Devonshire, who said she first became interested in medicine around the age of 12. Volunteering at KEMH from the age of 14, she said: "I was assigned to a different department each year.

"Now they've put me in the place I wanted to be. I wanted to do forensics and pathology is part of that, so I started here September of last year."

Her current work in Pathology has been geared to initiate Princine into the nuts and bolts of the work.

Princine said that establishing a cause of death is not about one person running a test.

"I see the work that goes on behind the scenes, what other people do, how others run all the tests, before they can find out what happened to the person. There's a lot of work with machines and testing the machines, and a lot of paperwork."

Shadowing Lisa Symonds, a registered nurse and point of care testing coordinator for the Department of Pathology at KEMH, allows Princine to observe the calibration of the Department's analysis equipment and the running of control tests, starting with the basics in both the laboratory and administrative side.

"It's another year before I can go next door," Princine said. Next door is the morgue department.

Morgue work is governed by strict rules.

No-one under the age of 18 can be admitted, and so far Princine's volunteer work has permitted her only to go so far as observing the study of tissue analysis related to cause of death. She turns 18 in December next year. "Not everybody has the stomach for that, and not everybody can do that job, but somebody still has to do it," Ms Symonds said.

According to KEMH, an average of 127 autopsies are performed there every year.

Princine said: "When I graduate from CedarBridge next year, I plan on going to Bermuda College to continue at science.

"Right now in school I'm taking chemistry, physics and biology. I want to continue in Bermuda, and then I plan on going abroad. I'm looking at Guelph, which is a school of science, and also Howard University, for medicine."

Ms. Symonds's mentoring of Princine is possible only for the most dedicated of volunteers. She wants student volunteers to learn about the work that goes into obtaining results in the department, which is a labour-intensive business.

Roughly three quarters of medical records come from the tests performed in Pathology, and much of their work concerns the living rather than the deceased, such as tests to identify disease at its earliest stages.

Princine said she attends the hospital one day a week, fitting in her medical volunteering with other activities such as dancing and the Youth News free newspaper for students.

Through Youth News, she attended the United Nations International School Youth Conference in New York last March, to observe debates on bioethics, and participated over the summer in its "Camp Cardio" healthy living campaign.

The results of Camp Cardio will be televised for ZBM 9, which will be broadcast as the 'National High School Challenge' from October to November.

Youth News coordinator Sarah Fellows said: "Princine was one of my leaders for Camp Cardio and I will have her as one of the TV anchors for the show. She'll be one of the student representatives sitting with [Bermuda Broadcasting programming manager] Darlene Ming. I call these students heroes because the reality is they're courageous to come forward and show leadership on youth health issues, and that's what this programme will show them confronting."

As Princine put it: "My parents feel it's a lot of work, but with the type of attitude I give, they say I can do what I want to do. I'm a committed person, and I'm the type of person who once I make up my mind I'm going to do it. I want to do forensics, but we don't have that here, so I'm going to do pathology."

According to the Bermuda Hospitals Board, the popular TV show 'CSI: Crime Scene Investigators' has sparked a great deal of youth interest in forensic medicine. As BHB spokesman Lena Ostroff put it: "Ten years ago, they all wanted to be paediatricians. Now it's forensics."

Ms Ostroff said the BHB is dedicated to keeping Bermudian medical students working on the Island. She said: "Especially with someone like Princine, who's so keen, we work really hard to place her in an area that will expose her to her field of interest, and we have a lot of young Bermudian nurses and doctors and technicians, thanks to people like Ms Symonds, who have the patience to take on and mentor people."

Even though Bermuda currently has no forensics lab of its own, she said, perhaps one day Princine will be return to work in a new one here.

For now, Princine covers the basic evaluations and calibrations of machines, and dealing with the paperwork for patient files.