Robert M. Veatch

Lainie F. Ross

Although the history of organ transplant has its roots in ancient Christian mythology, it is only in the past fifty years that body parts from a dead person have successfully been procured and transplanted into a living person. After fourteen years, the three main issues that Robert Veatch first outlined in his seminal study Transplantation Ethics still remain: deciding when human beings are dead; deciding when it is ethical to procure organs; and deciding how to allocate organs, once procured. However, much has changed. Enormous strides have been made in immunosuppression. Alternatives to the donation model are debated much more openly—living donors are used more widely and hand and face transplants have become more common, raising issues of personal identity. In this second edition of Transplantation Ethics, coauthored by Lainie Friedman Ross, transplant professionals and advocates will find a comprehensive update of this critical work on transplantation policies.

Transplantation Ethics, Second Edition

For most of human history there was little question about whether someone was dead or alive--a heartbeat or a pulse, or a foggy mirror under the nostrils, provided sufficient evidence. But in the mid-20th century, with new technologies and medical interventions that prolonged the dying process, the questions around the precise moment of death became much more complicated. Today the global medical community recognizes three general definitions of death: whole-brain, circulatory or somatic, and higher-brain. But even in the United States alone no single concept of death has the support of the majority of its citizens. Despite attempts to create and establish a uniform definition of death, physicians and policymakers continue to disagree on criteria and standards--resulting in confusion and acrimony in medicine, law, and insurance, not to mention families gathered around the bedside of a dying loved one. In this brief introduction Veatch and Ross lay out the history of this contentious issue and describe the three major definitions of death in detail. They contend that choosing a particular definition of death reflects an individual's basic religious and philosophical beliefs about what is essential to human existence. So while they propose higher-brain death as a default policy, they argue for some degree of personal choice.

Lainie F. Ross

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