Ruminations on Death
The World Congress of Bioethics is being held in Bangalore next month. There is a pre-congress workshop for transplant coordinators where ethical issues related to brain death and organ donation are going to be discussed. One of the issues being discussed is how we define death. Before organ donation became an integral part of modern medicine, there was little discordance between the medical definition of death and the religious ones. If the heart stopped beating and the breathing stopped (usually in rapid succession), and if efforts to restart them failed then the person was declared dead. Religious leaders who defined death as the soul leaving the body were happy to confirm that the moment of the departure of the soul was when the heart stopped beating. It is still common for people who have recovered after a cardiac arrest to claim that they died and came back. Images created by disordered firing of neurons short of oxygen were interpreted according to the cultural norms of the s