Death by Neurologic Criteria and Open-Ended Hope

In the early days of medicine, a patient was dead when his or her physician proclaimed them dead. The physical manifestations of death were proof positive, as there wasn’t much else available for physiologic proof positive. However, with the technological revolution in medicine, it was increasingly found that death didn’t occur all at once; death occurred in stages. This not only made it increasingly problematic to accurately point to an exact moment of death but also created a question as to whether death could be postponed indefinitely or even abolished.