Word: braining
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Many physicians now believe that the question "Is this patient dead?" should be answered largely on the basis of his electroencephalogram (EEC or "brain wave") tracings. "Although the heart has been enthroned through the ages as the sacred chalice of life's blood," says Boston's Neurosurgeon Dr. Hannibal Hamlin, "the human spirit is the product of man's brain, not his heart." Yet generally, in legal practice, a pronouncement of death is based only upon the heart's having stopped beating and takes no account of the brain...
...patient or his anguished kin. Trained from his first day in medical school that his duty is to save and prolong life, the physician may not only resort to extraordinary measures, but he may continue them even after a flat EEG line (meaning no electrical activity in the brain) has persisted so long that there can be no real hope of recovery...
...that the mechanical aids can do after the brain has reached its point of no return, says Dr. Hamlin, is to "maintain the look of life in the face of death." And at frightful cost in both money and emotion. The patient's family, says Harvard's Dr. Robert S. Schwab, suffers cruelly and may have to pay $250 a day for apparatus which is merely sending blood through an organism that is otherwise dead. "When," he asks, "do you pull the plug out and make this expensive equipment available to someone who might live...
Sweden's Dr. Clarence Crafoord, one of the world's greatest heart-lung surgeons, caused a public outcry earlier this month when he suggested that a person should be declared dead when a flat EEG pattern shows that his brain has definitely and irrevocably ceased to function. Dr. Crafoord was concerned about truly hopeless cases, but the kin of patients being kept alive with mechanical aids jumped to the conclusion that he meant the devices should be shut off, the patients declared dead, and their organs used for transplants...
This led to worried talk about "cannibalizing" human beings, like airplanes or autos, to get usable spare parts for others. France's National Academy of Medicine added to the furor by proposing that a patient may be adjudged dead if the EEG has shown no brain activity for 48 hours. After that, the academy recommended, surgeons should be allowed to remove vital organs for transplantation even before the artificial circulation is shut...