ABSTRACT

Death is such a common feature of medical practice that all doctors will have come into contact with it at some time in their medical career.

It is only organisms that have experienced life that can die, because death is the cessation of life in a previously living organism. A rock cannot die because it has never lived, but the fossil contained within it has lived and has died. Medically and scientifically, death is not an event, it is a process, and this is particularly so in the higher animals, including humans, in which the more complex and more specialized internal organs have different functions with different cellular metabolic processes which cease to function at different rates.