Brain Death

Abstract
(First of Two Parts)BRAIN death is widely accepted as a criterion of death in medical, legal and public opinion today. There seems to be a general medical understanding that it is to be used to describe a state of irreversible destruction of virtually the entire brain despite continued cardiac activity. An early paper, for example, suggested that it should be declared when the brain "no longer functions and has no possibility of functioning again."1 A recent study called it "total destruction of the brain."2 In medical practice the term has been restricted to cases with irreversible deep coma and . . .