ABSTRACT
Diagnostic criteria for brainstem death were subsequently developed, and in 1968, following a complex ethical and philosophical debate, brainstem death was accepted as being equivalent to somatic death by the World Medical Association, as it represented a state when ‘the body as an integrated whole has ceased to function’. In the UK this position was accepted in a 1976 memorandum from the Conference of the Medical Royal Colleges and their Faculties.2,3 This allowed discontinuation of ventilation in patients whose brains had irreversibly ceased to function; the diagnosis and implications of brainstem death have changed little since then. The development of the concept of brainstem death also made possible organ transplantation from brainstem-dead, heart-beating donors.
