Authors: Nereo Zamperetti Rinaldo Bellomo
Publish Date: 2009/04/17
Volume: 35, Issue: 7, Pages: 1305-1307
Abstract
“Our primary purpose is to define irreversible coma as a new criterion for death” With these words in 1967 the Harvard’s Committee started one of the most influential papers ever published in the medical literature 1 In it the Committee did not produce any scientific reason to justify why braindead patients are dead but used moral and social justifications to demonstrate why they should be regarded as deadIn 1981 a scientific reason was proposed to justify brain death BD with the theory of the “brain as the central integrator of the body” According to this theory after BD the organism becomes a rapidly disintegrating collection of organs Consequently the concept of BD is not a moral and/or social concept and a matter of values but rather a matter of scientific facts an incontrovertible biological datum “Death is the permanent cessation of functioning of the organism as a whole … The criterion of permanent loss of functioning of the entire brain is perfectly
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