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The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers--How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death
The Undead Organ Harvesting the IceWater Test Beating Heart CadaversHow Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death Author:Dick Teresi An important and provocative examination of why the line between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, is a blurred one, even with the tools of advanced technology, and especially in light of the business of organ harvesting. — In this fascinating look at how the determination of death has become complicated and bewildering, Dick Ter... more »esi introduces us to brain-death experts, hospice workers, undertakers, coma specialists and those who have recovered from coma, organ transplant surgeons and organ procurers, anesthesiologists who study pain in legally dead patients, doctors who have saved live patients from organ harvests, nurses who care for beating-heart cadavers, ICU doctors who feel subtly pressured to declare patients dead rather than save them, and many others. Teresi writes about how death has been determined through the ages, beginning with the ancient Egyptians, and about the 1968 Harvard Medical School paper that officially stated that death was not cardiopulmonary failure or cell death but a "loss of personhood"?i.e., brain death. And throughout, he makes clear that organ harvesting has become big business, while the medical establishment has become less and less clear about who is truly dead or alive.« less