Abstract
Given the advances made in the biomedical sciences across the twentieth century and that continue today one could assume that we are in possession of a proper definition of certain fundamental concepts, such as life and death. However, if anything, these same advances have contributed to a great deal of uncertainty surrounding death and how we ought to understand it. Can a person in a chronic vegetative state be the object of therapeutic obstinacy, when the chances for recovery are extremely poor? Are those born with severe anencephaly sufficiently alive to be declared dead? Are those we assess as brain dead already dead or do they die once we cease providing life support or perhaps a short time afterwards? The law requires that medical doctors record a time of death not least because, as Lamb puts it ‘[i]t is as wrong to treat the living as dead as it is to treat the dead as alive.’
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Notes
- 1.
D. Lamb, ‘What is death?’ in R. Gillon (ed.) Principles of Health Care Ethics. Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons, 1994.
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Vidal, Fernando. 2009. ‘Brainhood, Anthropological Figure of Modernity’. History of the Human Sciences 22 (1): 5–36.
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Truog, R. D. 2007. ‘Brain Death-Too Flawed to Endure, Too Ingrained to Abandon’. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 35 (2): 273–281.
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Zaner, Richard M. 2012. Death: Beyond Whole-Brain Criteria. Springer Science & Business Media.
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Emmerich, N. 2016. ‘The Deaths of Human Beings’. QJM: An International Journal of Medicine 109 (4): 229–30. https://doi.org/10.1093/qjmed/hcv195
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Randall, Fiona, and R S Downie. 2006. The Philosophy of Palliative Care: Critique and Reconstruction. OUP Oxford.
- 7.
Of course, gaps remain: can a tetraplegic refuse to be medically assisted in feeding? Might they refuse feeding and ask to be sedated until death? Given the role played by medicine in placing such patients in this position it is right that medicine leave them to a motionless life? These are not, however, questions we have sought to address, at least not directly.
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Mallia, P., Emmerich, N., Gordijn, B., Pistoia, F. (2022). Conclusions. In: Mallia, P., Emmerich, N., Gordijn, B., Pistoia, F. (eds) Challenges to the Global Issue of End of Life Care. Advancing Global Bioethics, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86386-9_15
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