RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Danish ethics council rejects brain death as the criterion of death -- commentary 2: return to Elsinore. JF Journal of Medical Ethics JO J Med Ethics FD BMJ Publishing Group Ltd and Institute of Medical Ethics SP 10 OP 13 DO 10.1136/jme.16.1.10 VO 16 IS 1 A1 Christopher Pallis YR 1990 UL http://jme.bmj.com/content/16/1/10.abstract AB No discussion of when an individual is dead is meaningful in the absence of a definition of death. If human death is defined as the irreversible loss of the capacity for consciousness combined with the irreversible loss of the capacity to breathe spontaneously (and hence to maintain a spontaneous heart beat) the death of the brainstem will be seen to be the necessary and sufficient condition for the death of the individual. Such a definition of death is not something radically new. It is merely the reformulation -- in the language of the neurophysiologist -- of much older concepts such as the 'departure of the (conscious) soul from the body' and the 'loss of the breath of life'. All death -- in this perspective -- is, and always has been, brainstem death....