I'm reading "Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease" by Allan H. Ropper, Brian David Burrell and wanted to share this quote with you.
"Committee accomplished was to find a good reason not to utilize resources on people who would unquestionably die without ever regaining consciousness. Being able to change their classification and call them dead had virtue for society. They said, in effect, “It’s not living if your brain is irrevocably gone; it’s not living, so you can go ahead and take the organs.” They had a clear mandate to protect the physician. They recommended, for example, that the patient be declared dead before the respirator is disconnected, so as to avoid the appearance of pulling the plug on a living person. They also recommended that any physicians involved in transplanting the organs recuse themselves from the decision process. But they were guided by practical motives, not strictly scientific ones, and the legacy of the Beecher Committee and the Presidential Commission have now trapped us. What somebody needed to say was: we’re going to have a societal shift, and if your brain is so irrevocably and totally damaged that there is no hope of recovery, and it’s total (so that there won’t be any quibbling), then the patient is in a state where it is reasonable to do organ transplants. Calling it death was the problem."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/us/organ-transplants-donors-alive.html
ReplyDeleteAnother story in today's paper.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/us/federal-crackdown-organ-donations.html
Google shows a lot more stories.
Did chazal know about the brain and its function?
ReplyDeleteChazal knew everything. They were light years ahead of us.
DeleteWho told you that?
DeleteYou could say they are ahead of us in halakha, which is obvious.
They didn't know the speed of light.
Also, why don't you use Talmudic medicine? If it's better than modern?
Hezekiah had a book of cures, but he had to hide it - according to chazal. So they didn't have access to it. Or did they?
The rational answer is that Chazal had access to the science of their times. They also had access to traditional understandings of certain medical conditions. One was that cessation of respiration was the definition of death. Until the invention of the ventilator, there was little difference between cardiac and respiratory death. If the heart stopped, you stopped breathing. If you stopped breathing, the heart stopped a few minutes later.
DeleteThe ventilator changed all that and now one can keep a heart beating even if the patient can't breathe spontaneously and that's created the debate between cardiac and respiratory death.
One can be sure Chazal knew nothing of ventilators and that's not a criticism or a disrespect. If they had, they'd also have invented CPR and they didn't.
"Chazal were light years ahead of us" -
DeleteTherefore they had advanced f35 jets, Moab and bunker buster bombs , and missiles to sink the Roman ships before they even reached Israel.
And they had tanks that could shield against Roman swords and arrows...
But still they lost the war, as did bar kochba and his backer rabbi akiva