Stiff chapter 8 Summary

In How To Know If You're Dead, Mary Roach visits the life of beating-heart (or live) cadavers. Following in specific, a female cadaver called H. H is a dead woman of whom the staff of the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center was keeping "alive" for organ harvesting. While on her visit at the medical center, she contemplates when exactly the soul leaves the body and when somebody is truly dead. Doctors, such as Duncan Macdougall and Robert Whytt, have all had a fascination with both when the soul leaves the body after death and where the would presides while the individual is living. Theories range from the soul living in the liver, the heart and the brain, but there aren't any valid answers yet. Robert Whytt, with the hardest theory to disprove, hypothesized that the would did not have a set resting place, but was infused throughout in the blood. Roach had also told the story of Thomas Edison, who like many others, had his own theory which consisted of humans being controlled by "life units" and not a soul. Another portion of this chapter was how the legal and medical community views the moment when someone dies. Through the case of Andrew Lyons, the accusation if the harvester of the victims organs killing the victim and, not Lyons, legislation soon made brain death the legal definition of death. Worry in the medical community had arisen with this though conscerning a "locked in state". In his state the body is paralyzed, but the person, still alive, has control over the mind, but doctors worry that heart transplants may take place on the false pretense that the patient is dead and not just in a "locked in state". The chapter then ends again with Roach's personal opinion, this time on organ donation. She, like myself, believes that with the high death rate of people on waiting lists for organs, why should one hold that back after death?

 

 

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