ABSTRACT
The quest for a definition of death, adequate to those patients whose condition is ‘masked’ by the technology of intensive-therapy units, has become the quest for the ultimate seat of human life: for the physiological and anatomical core of human life, whose loss constitutes the death of the human being as a whole. There is a general acceptance that this core is identified with the brain: British medical practice employs the further identification of a physiological ‘kernel’ within the brain itself, namely the brainstem whose functioning underpins the functioning of the brain as a whole, and thence of the human being.
