Table of Contents

1. Strange Business2. The Justification: Beecher's Ethics3. The Law4. The Criteria I: The Waking Brain—Brainstem and the Discourse of Consciousness5. The Criteria II: The Working Brain: The Comatose Patient and the Biology of Consciousness6. Brain Death After Beecher and the Limits of Bioethics

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*