Post mortem examination of a dead body is carried out to gain insight into the disease process as well as for forensic application of medical knowledge. Although different specialists viz; pathologists and forensic medicine experts, carry out autopsy for these two purposes, on many occasions there may be overlap of these two fields of medicine. A comparative analysis of both these categories of autopsies, namely clinical autopsy and medico legal autopsy, is done in this article with the intention of equipping the specialists in these two fields of medicine with knowledge about the other.