Merinda Teller

Over the past six decades, solid organ transplantation has gone from an i y experiment to a “standard-of-care” procedure performed on a “near-routine” basis. However, a leading Brazilian neurologist and professor recently furnished some historical context for the rise in transplantation that should give pause. Discussing the origins of “brain death” as a concept and diagnosis, the professor notes that the term came into use in the 1960s immediately “after the first successful human heart transplant ’triggered a demand for transplantable vital organs to be harvested from patients’ who were considered to be ’hopelessly comatose’ according to medical knowledge at that time.” Calling such patients brain dead “enabled the medical community to overcome all of the legal hurdles associated with removing [their] vital organs,” but, the Brazilian neurologist contends, “In a very large number of those patients, they have no [brain] damage at all.”