The Diagnosis of Brain Death

To the Editor: At the beginning of his article on brain death (April 19 issue), 1 Dr. Wijdicks states, “Physicians, health care workers, members of the clergy, and laypeople throughout the world have accepted fully that a person is dead when his or her brain is dead.” This statement is dogma, not fact. Many societies throughout the world and some cultures represented in American society do not accept this view. As he later implies, the introduction of brain death as a construct was a political decision first promoted in 1968 by an ad hoc committee at Harvard Medical School, prompted by . . .