Total brain death—the complete and irreversible cessation of functioning of all parts of the brain—has been widely accepted in ethics and law as a valid criterion for pronouncing t
Discrepancies between the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) and the adult and pediatric diagnostic guidelines for brain death (BD) (the “Guidelines”) have motivated proposa
On August 29, 2000, Pope John Paul II addressed the 18th International Congress of the Transplantation Society that was being held in Rome. His brief discourse to that meeting of p
The philosophical investigation of human death has focused on two overarching questions: (1) What is human death? and (2) How can we determine that it has occurred? The first quest
Few philosophical questions have as much practical import as how to understand the nature of organismic death (hereafter, “death” see Death).Dead human beings, for example, are bel
The most fundamental philosophical question about death is the question concerning its nature or essence – ‘What is death?’. When philosophers offer answers to this question, they
The Supreme Pontiff declares that the Church’s action gains support from scientific discovery. Human life and dignity must be defended at all points and thus researchers must at ti
It is a well-known fact that for some time certain scientific approaches to ascertaining death have shifted the emphasis from the traditional cardio-respiratory signs to the so-cal
The traditional criteria of human death were rigor mortis and decomposition, then irreversible cardiorespiratory arrest (cessation of heart beat and breathing), and more recently (since the development beginning in the 1960s of heart and other vital organ transplantation) cessation of neurological activity. The last of these ‘brain death’ came to prominence following the 1968 Harvard Medical School proposal to define human death as ‘irreversible coma’. Ordinarily these three kinds of criteria coincide or are closely associated but developments in medical technology, such as artificial respiration have tended to separate the second and third leading to debates as to whether someone who is breathing but lacks upper brain function is actually dead. More recently there have been attempts to weave criteria together as incomplete parts or a complete and clinically usable criterion of death.