Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

IS THE BRAIN-DEAD PATIENT REALLY DEAD? 283proposed the concept of brain death as a more accurate definitionfor death. 13 The committee listed the following as characteristicsof BD: 1) unreceptivity and unresponsitivity; 2) nomovements or breathing; and 3) no reflexes. We should alsomention here that the Ad Hoc Committee did include one testfor its criteria – a flat electroencephalogram – that could be usedto confirm a diagnosis of BD.Note that the list of characteristics provided by the committeeis primarily a list of criteria for death. Significantly, there wasno attempt to provide a justification for the validity of these criteriaincluding an argument to show why these particular characteristicswere authentic signs of death. No definition of deathwas provided. Some commentators, noting that the Ad HocCommittee had advocated whole-brain criteria for death (characteristicstwo and three mentioned above require loss of thetotal brain), have suggested that the committee and its chairman,Dr. Henry K. Beecher, had embraced a biological definitionof death that saw death as the loss of organic integration, butthis claim has been challenged by proponents of higher-braindefinitions. 14 As one historian has pointed out, however, bothsides distort Beecher’s concerns because “his primary concernwas not which theory of life won out, nor whether his own theoreticalpositions were consistent. What counted was solvingsuch practical problems as protecting transplantation and endinguseless treatments.” 15 What is key for our discussion here isthat the Harvard Ad Hoc Committee did not provide a conceptualjustification for its proposal to equate BD and death.Why did the Ad Hoc Committee propose the new criterionfor death? This is one question that often comes up in the debate13The Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examinethe Definition of Brain Death, “A definition of irreverisble coma,” JAMA 205(1968): 85-88.14Henry S. PERNICK, “Brain Death in a Cultural Context: TheReconstruction of Death, 1967-1981,” in The Definition of Death:Contemporary Controversies, ed. Stuart J. Youngner, Robert M. Arnold, andRenie Schapiro (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp.3-33, p. 12.15Ibid.