ABSTRACT
The human brain has been a focus of medico-legal debates since the late 1960s. It was then that efforts were made to formulate an alternative definition of death, one centred on brain function rather than heart-and-lung function. It was the development of mechanical ventilation and the emergence of heart transplantation which necessitated this new definition of death. The chapter focuses on the brain in the living human. In the seventeenth century, the French philosopher Damasio AR Descartes wrote of the brain as a machine: he understood it as based on the principles of hydraulics. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the pseudo-sciences of physiognomy and phrenology developed. The former tends to be associated today with Lombroso, an Italian proto-criminologist who tried to explain criminal behaviour in biological terms. The discovery of the X-ray in 1895 is a watershed event. For the first time it was possible to see into the body without undertaking surgery.
