Intensive Care, Vegetative State, and Brain Death

Abstract

Severe brain damage poses special problems in ethics and neurosciences because of the nature of the brain itself and its direct relation to human life and death, communication, mental and psychological processes, and many other functions of high human value. There is an enormous difference between damage to the brain and to any other organ. Generally speaking, each part of the brain plays a specialized role in an integrated function, often of high human quality, which cannot be replaced by other cells or parts of the brain. In contrast to this, the different parts of the liver, for example, are related to life only indirectly via the brain, and are not so specialized that functions cannot be taken over by other parts of the same liver, or even another liver (transplantation). This is one of the reasons that brain death (“Partialtod”) is considered equivalent to death (“Totaltod”) since after brain death only the empty shell of the human body remains.