In this paper we describe a prototype expert system for assigning codes to injuries detected in medical records such as hospital discharge summaries and coroners' reports. The system is intended to assist investigators in the task of analyzing official data related to injuries sustained by the occupants of automobiles involved in highway accidents. The design draws on previous work by the authors in the areas of knowledge-based in formation retrieval and pragmatically oriented natural language processing. The prototype system is implemented on a high-performance workstation and can coffectly identify and code a range of injury types.