by Paul C. Fox

About the author: Paul C. Fox is a medical doctor in Farmington, Pennsylvania.

Not so many years ago death was a simple enough concept. If a person’s heart ceased to beat for any great length of time he was dead, and that was that. Then along came medical technology, and suddenly what had been simple became complicated. Now a person’s heart can be stopped completely for hours, and yet, thanks to the heart-lung machine, that person’s brain will survive undamaged. The person is dead by the old definition, yet obviously not really dead. On the other hand—again thanks to medical technology—a person’s brain can be irreparably destroyed, even though the heart may be kept beating for many hours. The person is...