Defining Death

Beauchamp and Childress, in their Principles of Biomedical Ethics , describe how an African tribe, the Nuer, used conceptual ploy to circumvent moral prohibition against killing unwanted newborns. 1 ... the Nuer tribe viewed defective newborns as nonhuman hippopotamuses who were mistakenly born to human parents and who would be put in the river, which was viewed as their natural habitat. Does our own society's rapid and widespread embrace of so-called brain death represent similar form of conceptual gerrymandering? A review of the social, medical, and public policy developments of the last two decades leaves the answer to this question in doubt. In 1968, an ad hoc committee at the Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass, proposed a new criterion for death: total and irreversible loss of functioning of the whole brain. 2 The motivation was clearly stated as follows: (1) to relieve the burden imposed by severely brain-damaged patients;