So when you say, "witnessed," do you mean you watched youtube videos or have you been in attendance at actual autopsies? I've never seen one except phony ones in TV dramas and I have no desire to do so.
It was definitely a unpleasant experience. Of course, there was glass between us in the gallery and the doctors, but even if you closed your eyes, you could hear everything. The doctor sawed the top of one guy's head off to get to the brain. I'll remember the sound of that saw until my dying day.
When the saw cuts through the skull there is a smell from the friction and a variety of different odors as different organs are disected. Not at all unpleasant and similar to the smells in a meat locker.
The smell of the Stryker saw going through bones is not pleasant either. In forensic one, they usually suck out eye fluid; it is gross and drives funeral homes crazy, as they have to replace the fluid to make the eyelids normal-looking in an open casket.
The worst are the badly-burned and the "floaters". This is rather a morbid thread. To lighten it up a bit, I remember an incident that was related to me years ago by an on-site witness. It occurred in a major Level 1 Trauma Center in Illinois, which will be unnamed. The Emergency Room there was a very busy place on a number of fronts. Across the hallway from the main ER was a branch Blood Bank and a temporary morgue where the recently deceased were placed awaiting transfer to the larger morgue one floor below. The Blood Bank was staffed by one tech during the graveyard shift, and he was either very busy or had nothing to do. During the slow periods, he discovered that he could sneak into the little temporary morgue room and nap on the gurneys there. They always called him if they needed him, and no one ever came over for casual visits, and the phone would wake him up. No harm done. One night however, a vigilant security guard noticed a corpse on a gurney awaiting transfer to the morgue and took it upon himself to move the body to the large fridge in the main morgue. He didn't notice that there was no tag on the body, and moved the gurney into the elevator and down to the morgue. It was a bog place and they had a large refrigerated room to hold the bodies until the funeral homes picked them up in the morning (usually). This guy was place din that fridge and awoke when he got cold in total darkness. He could feel cold bodies on each side when he reached out. He never again napped in the temporary morgue.
They make everything look so real now days. It would seem with all those guys have seem on reality TV these days...watching somebody have a baby would be a snap!
I watched a youtube video done by a young woman who is a mortician. She described all the different methods of preparing a body for viewing, how they wire mouths shut, etc. I must say, it is quite a disgusting process and I'm glad I'll be cremated. Her channel is called "Ask a Mortician" and she looks like Abby Sciuto (NCIS).