Abstract
Brain death is a concept that was created by an ad hoc committee of the Harvard Medical School 50 years ago. It has become an accepted standard, along with cardiopulmonary criteria, to determine death. Many have taken this acceptance by the medical profession and society at large as vindication of the concept. In this chapter, we will evaluate the historical climate and historical figures that led to the development of brain death. A theoretical case will be presented outlining some of the difficulties developing in the fraction of patients that are declared dead using brain death criteria rather than cardiorespiratory criteria. A legal view of the inception and development of brain death will be discussed. In the end, we will question whether the dead-donor rule has, in the long run, led to more or less viable organs available for transplantation.
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Shaw, M.H., Kaufman, D.C. (2019). Brain Death. In: LaRosa, J. (eds) Adult Critical Care Medicine. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94424-1_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94424-1_12
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