New York Times Book Review
Published: March 30, 2012
The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers
— How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death
How dead would you like to be before your organs are harvested for donation? According to Dick Teresi in “The Undead,” “pretty dead” is good enough for transplant surgeons. “If you wait for everything to be a hundred percent,” a physician tells him, “you’d never have organ donation.”
In days of yore, the absence of a heartbeat was the gold standard for determining death, but even that wasn’t foolproof. “People declared dead come back to life with some frequency,” Teresi writes. They recover from drowning, coma, asphyxia and lightning strikes. Rigor mortis doesn’t always occur in the dead, and it can occur in the living. Even experienced practitioners could misdiagnose stiffness or coldness, a lack of breath or pulse. An 18th-century Frenchman recorded “more than 150 pages of accounts of premature burial and mistaken death” between ancient times and the mid-1700s.
Read the full article in the New York Times Book Review
The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers
— How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death
Dick Teresi (Author)
Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
Publication Date: March 13, 2012
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375423710
ISBN-13: 978-0375423710
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