The concept of brain death was recently described as being “at once well settled and persistently unresolved.” Every day, in the United States and around the world, physicians diagnose patients as brain dead, and then proceed to transplant organs from these patients into others in need. Yet as well settled as this practice has become, brain death continues to be the focus of controversy, with two journals in bioethics dedicating major sections to the topic within the last two years.By way (...) of background, the Uniform Determination of Death Act states that “[a]n individual who has sustained either: irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead. A determination of death must be made in accordance with accepted medical standards.” In other words, death can be defined by either cardiorespiratory or neurological criteria, with “brain death” representing the loss of all brain function. This standard, or closely related variants, has become the accepted approach throughout the United States and in many parts of the world. (shrink)

“Brain death,” the determination of human death by showing the irreversible loss of all clinical functions of the brain, has become a worldwide practice. A biophilosophical account of brain death requires four sequential tasks: agreeing on the paradigm of death, a set of preconditions that frame the discussion; determining the definition of death by making explicit the consensual concept of death; determining the criterion of death that proves the definition has been fulfilled by being both necessary and sufficient for death; (...) and determining the tests of death for physicians to employ at the patient's bedside to demonstrate that the criterion of death has been fulfilled. The best definition of death is “the cessation of functioning of the organism as a whole.” The whole-brain criterion is the only criterion that is both necessary and sufficient for death. Brain death tests are used only in the unusual case in which a patient's ventilation is being supported. Brain death critics have identified weaknesses in its formulation. But despite its shortcomings, the whole-brain death formulation comprises a concept and public policy that make intuitive and practical sense and that has been well accepted by many societies. (shrink)

Relatives’ presence in connection with cardiopulmonary resuscitation and sudden death at the intensive care unit Within Norwegian intensive care units it is common to focus on the needs of the next of kin of patients undergoing end‐of‐life care. Offering emotional and practical support to relatives is regarded as assisting them in the initial stages of their grief process. It has also become usual to encourage relatives to be present at the time of death of close relatives. How can dignified end‐of‐life (...) care coexist with the sometimes turbulent and dramatic character of intensive care in the highly technological environment of intensive care units? This paper describes a case study based on an incident that took place at the intensive care unit (ICU) of Trondheim University Hospital, Norway, in which the relatives of a newly deceased patient voiced unusually strong dissatisfaction with the way they were excluded in connection with cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). The next of kin's criticism highlights an important paradox as well as a degree of inconsistency in lifesaving and end‐of‐life care at the ICU. I argue that an investigation of the multiple identities within medical practice can illuminate the potential for clashes between lifesaving and end‐of‐life care, as described and analysed in this paper. (shrink)

This paper examines how death is managed in a larger regional hospital within the Norwegian health‐care. The central focus of my paper concerns variations in how healthcare personnel enact death and handle the dead patient. Over several decades, modern standardised hospital death has come under critique in the western world. Such critique has resulted in changes in the standardisation of hospital deaths within Norwegian health‐care. In the wake of the hospice movement and with greater focus on palliative care, doors have (...) gradually been opened and relatives of the deceased are now more often invited to participate. I explore how the medical practice around death along with the procedure manual of post‐mortem care at Trondheim University Hospital has changed. I argue that in the late‐modern context, standardisation of hospital death is a multidimensional affair, embedded in a far more comprehensive framework than the depersonalised medico‐legal. In the late‐modern Norwegian hospital, interdisciplinary negotiation and co‐operation has allowed a number of different agendas to co‐exist, without any ensuing loss of the medical power holder's authority to broker death. I follow Mol's notion of praxiographic orientation of the actor–network approach while exploring this medical practice. (shrink)

: Most of the world now accepts the idea, first proposed four decades ago, that death means "brain death." But the idea has always been open to criticism because it doesn't square with all of our intuitions about death. In fact, none of the possible definitions of death quite works. Death, perhaps surprisingly, eludes definition, and "brain death" can be accepted only as a refinement of what is in fact a fuzzy concept.

The definition of death is one of the oldest and most enduring problems in biophilosophy and bioethics. Serious controversies over formally defining death began with the invention of the positive-pressure mechanical ventilator in the 1950s. For the first time, physicians could maintain ventilation and, hence, circulation on patients who had sustained what had been previously lethal brain damage. Prior to the development of mechanical ventilators, brain injuries severe enough to induce apnea quickly progressed to cardiac arrest from hypoxemia. Before the (...) 1950s, the loss of spontaneous breathing and heartbeat were perfect predictors of death because the functioning of the brain and of all other organs ceased rapidly and nearly simultaneously thereafter, producing a unitary death phenomenon. In the pretechnological era, physicians and philosophers did not have to consider whether a human being who had lost certain “vital functions” but had retained others was alive, because such cases were technically impossible. (shrink)