Brain death-the condition of a non-functioning brain, has been widely adopted around the world as a definition of death since it was detailed in a Report by an Ad Hoc Committee of Harvard Medical School faculty in 1968. It also remains a focus of controversy and debate, an early source of criticism and scrutiny of the bioethics movement. Death before Dying: History, Medicine, and Brain Death looks at the work of the Committee in a way that has not been attempted before in terms of tracing back the context of its own sources-the reasoning of it Chair, Henry K Beecher, and the care of patients in coma and knowledge about coma and consciousness at the time. That history requires re-thinking the debate over brain death that followed which has tended to cast the Committee's work in ways this book questions. This book, then, also questions common assumptions about the place of bioethics in medicine. This book discusses if the advent of bioethics has distorted and limited the possibilities for harnessing medicine for social progress. It challenges historical scholarship of medicine to be more curious about how medical knowledge can work as a potentially innovative source of values.

About the Author
Gary S. Belkin, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H.Senior Director for Psychiatric ServicesNYC Health and Hospitals CorporationOffice of Behavioral HealthAssociate Professor and Director, Program in Global Mental HealthNYU School of MedicineNew York, NY 10016Ph: 212.788.3476 (c): 401-499-7745

Reviews
Death before Dying is a work of admirable detail and insight. It offers a useful description of the postwar work of a powerhouse Harvard committee, whose report on brain death continues to have great consequence in courts, clinics, and everyday life. * Laura Stark, Vanderbilt University, USA; Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 89, No. 4, Winter 2015 *
This work is an exploration of, in essence, a very simple neurological finding generating all sorts of vexed questions and sophistical arguments. Belkin does much right in this relevant historical work. * Eelco Wijdicks, Brain: A Journal of Neurology *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199898176
Author Gary Belkin
Format Hardback
Page Count 288
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 576g
Dimensions(mm) 160mm * 239mm * 25mm