Intermitências da morte: redefinições do ser humano na difusão da morte cerebral como fato médico

Abstract

This paper presents different definitions of brain death, as part of the process of sketching the construction of brain death as a medical fact. Since its publication at the end of the 1960s in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the definition of brain death has drawn both adherents and opponents. In order to be deployed in statutory texts, in the early 1980s, the definition was reshaped and consolidated as whole-brain death. In the course of that process, other definitions had been offered as alternatives to the whole-brain death, such as brainstem death and higher brain death. Since each definition was supposed to provide a 'good' definition of death, it was linked with a specific conception of "human being". Different conceptions of human being were articulated with the redefinitions of death that were proposed between the 1960's and the 1990's. In some of these conceptions, location in the brain or in the organism as whole is fundamental; in others, the presence of "personhood", "personal identity" or "full moral standing".