What Is Death?

Goings-on that sounded like Frankensteinian attempts to raise the dead were recounted last week to the Massachusetts Medical Society. The narrator, Boston Medical Examiner William Joseph Brickley,* has for many years been trying to determine the precise time of legal death.

Chief difficulty: the different parts of the body do not all die at the same time.

Electrocution. One recent midnight, Dr. Brickley carted away the still warm body of an electrocuted convict from Boston's sooty Charlestown Prison. In Massachusetts General Hospital, half an hour after death was pronounced, the doctor tried to find some vestiges of life.

He attached electrodes to the man's brain and heart, tried vainly to stimulate them. He injected an adrenalin compound into the heart, meanwhile compressing the chest. No results. Only sign of life: when he struck the man's forearm with a rubber hammer, it twitched like a knee jerk. After two hours, Dr. Brickley pronounced him "dead beyond recall." Electrocution, said Dr. Brickley last week, kills in three different ways: 1) it heats the body abnormally, coagulating the blood; 2) it contracts the muscles, choking off the body's supply of oxygen; 3) it produces rupture and hemorrhages of brain and heart.

Brain Tumor. Last winter, in the hospital, Dr. Brickley watched a woman who lay dying of a brain tumor. An electrocardiograph and electroencephalograph were attached to her heart and brain to record their electrical waves. First the waves on the left side of her brain stopped. Ten minutes later, the waves on the right side stopped. For ten further minutes, the heart waves kept on. When the heart stopped, the doctors declared the woman dead. But five minutes later, with no stimulation or drugs, the heart started to beat again, continued throbbing for five minutes. According to Dr. Brickley, this was not unusual. Science has various definitions of death. In Dr. Brickley's opinion, life is over when brain waves cease.

* Not to be confused with Texas goat-gland Practitioner John Richard Brinkley, who broadcasts his nostrums from Mexico and is now running for Senator from Texas.

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