Brain death/cessation of life

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..... solete. In order to understand the nature and scope of brain death, it is worthwhile to look at how death was understood. Historically, as the oft-quoted definition in Black's Law Dictionary suggests, death was: "The cessation of life; the ceasing to exist; defined by physicians as a total stoppage of the circulation of the blood, and a cessation of the animal and vital functions conseq .....

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..... This understanding of death emerged from a cardiopulmonary perspective. In such cases, the brain was usually irrelevant -- being understood that the cessation of circulation would automatically lead to the death of brain cells, which require a great deal of blood to survive. The invention of the ventilator and the defibrillator in the 1920s altered this understanding, it being now possible that .....

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..... .4 It is important to understand that this definition goes beyond acknowledging consciousness -- a person who is incapable of ever regaining consciousness will not be considered to be brain dead as long as parts of the brain e.g. brain stem that regulate involuntary activity (such as response to light, respiration, heartbeat etc.) still continue to function. Likewise, if consciousness, albeit seve .....

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..... ivity whatsoever for a significant amount of time. To say, in most cases, that only the death of the higher brain would be a criteria for `brain death' may have certain serious consequences -- for example, a foetus, technically under this definition, would not be considered to be alive at all. Similarly, as per this, different definitions of death would apply to human and non-human organisms. .....

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..... ine the Definition of Brain Death, A Definition of Irreversible Coma, 205 JAMA 337, 337-40 (1968). injury that caused them to be in an irreversible coma, and had lost the ability to breathe spontaneously"6, would be considered dead. This criticism led to the Presidents' Committee, set up for the purpose, in 1981, defining death more vaguely as the point "where the body's physiolo .....

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