Together and Scrambled. Brain Death Was Conceived in Order to Facilitate Organ Donation

Abstract

A disagreement persists about whether brain death is a phenomenon that has been discovered according to strictly scientific criteria, or rather a legal fiction created to avoid controversy in securing organs for transplantation. In this article I make a historical examination of the origin of brain death to demonstrate the latter. I argue that three organisms recognized in the decade of the 1960s as their main reason to incorporate the neurological criterion of death, that such new criterion would facilitate the procurement of vital organs, such as the heart, without surgeons being perceived as murderers. One of these institutions was the French Medical College in 1965. This belies the common belief that the first organism to propose the assimilation of the loss of brain functions to human death was the Ad Hoc Committee for The Brain Death of the Harvard Medical School in 1968.