Read more: “Death: A special report on the inevitable“
IT IS now easier to be declared dead than at any time in human history. The standards have fallen so low that your heart can be beating, your brain can be sending out brainwaves, and the doctor can still declare you an ex-person. The good news: only about 1 per cent of the population is subject to minimal death criteria. The bad news: if you fall into this 1 per cent, you may be vivisected.
But we’re getting ahead of our story.
The question “When is a person dead?” has troubled us for thousands of years. It is not a trivial matter, especially to the person about to be buried or cremated. So we look for what we believe to be foolproof clues. Is there a central organ that when it stops functioning means a human is dead? Is there a set of behaviours that signals with certainty that a human has shuffled off this mortal coil, kicked the bucket, expired?
In ancient Egypt the buck stopped at the embalmer. The ancient Greeks knew that many conditions mimicked death. Their test was to cut off a finger before cremation.
Medieval Europeans became increasingly uncertain about who was dead and who was alive as the literature began to fill with accounts of premature burial. The difficulties were underscored by the anatomy theatres that sprang up across Europe in the 1500s to the 1700s, where anatomists would perform public dissections on executed prisoners. The performances sometimes demonstrated that the stars of the show were not quite dead. An anatomist might …