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British Journal of Anaesthesia, 2004, Vol. 92, No. 5 625-628
© 2004 The Board of Management and Trustees of the British Journal of Anaesthesia

Editorial I

Death and its diagnosis by doctors

G. R. Park

John Farman Intensive Care Unit, Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge CB2 2QQ, UKE-mail: gilbertpark@doctors.org.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

There is no legal definition of death in the UK; the law accepts the opinion of a suitably experienced, registered medical practitioner to say when a person is dead. Training in the diagnosis of death is often taught on the wards as a practical skill. Once qualified, doctors often start diagnosing death almost immediately as a pre-registration house officer on the ward. Formal guidelines on how to diagnose death in this situation are rare. Undergraduate medical textbooks seem to ignore the topic. On looking up ‘death’ in the index of Kumar and Clark,1 I found only one reference to brain death; Davidson’s,2 Medicine at a Glance,3 and Chamberlain’s Symptoms and Signs4 had nothing; and Hutchison’s Clinical Methods5 spoke about confidentiality after death and described brain death and organ donation, but had nothing on cardiovascular death. Of the small selection I looked at, only the Oxford Textbook of Medicine6 . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Declaration of interest


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