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The “Critical Organ” for the Organism as a Whole

Lessons from the lowly spinal cord

  • Conference paper
Brain Death and Disorders of Consciousness

Part of the book series: Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology ((AEMB,volume 550))

Abstract

For over three decades now, it has been widely accepted that the death of one particular organ — the brain — constitutes human death. Much less a matter for agreement, however, has been the reason for that equivalence. The various proposed rationales can be subdivided into three main categories, corresponding to three fundamentally different concepts of death: (1) sociological (death is loss of conferred membership in society; its legal definition is culturally relative, and most modern societies happen to have chosen to recognize brain-based diagnoses); (2) psychological (death is loss of personhood due to loss of potential for all mental functions, and the brain is the organ of the mind); or (3) biological (death is loss of physiological, anti-entropic unity of an organism, and the brain is the hierarchically highest integrating organ of the body).

Presented at the Third International Symposium on Coma and Death, February 22–25, 2000, Havana. Adapted, with permission from Nature Publishing Group, Specialist Journals Division (formerly Stockton-Press), from Shewmon DA. Spinal shock and ‘brain death’: somatic pathophysiological equivalence and implications for the integrative-unity rationale. Spinal Cord 1999; 37(5): 313–324.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    D. Alan Shewmon MD (Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics)

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  1. D. Alan Shewmon MD
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Havana, Cuba

    Calixto Machado

  2. David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, California, USA

    D. Alan Shewmon

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Shewmon, D.A. (2004). The “Critical Organ” for the Organism as a Whole. In: Machado, C., Shewmon, D.A. (eds) Brain Death and Disorders of Consciousness. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 550. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-306-48526-8_3

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