Descartes proved wrong in his beliefs that all sensory inputs focused on the pineal gland and that the pineal itself was a selective motor organ, suspended in a whirl of “animal spirits,” dancing and jigging “like a balloon captive above a fire,” yet capable in humans of scrutinizing inputs and producing actions “consistent with wisdom.” He was also wrong when he spoke of the “ideas formed on the surface” of the pineal gland, and in his attribution to the pineal of such functions as “volition, cognition, memory, imagination, and reason.” But he was uncannily correct in his insight that a very small part of this deep and central area of the brain was relevant to some of the functions he stressed. We now know that immediately below the pineal gland there lies the mesencephalic tegmentum (the uppermost part of the brain stem), which is crucial to generating alertness (the capacity for consciousness), without which, of course, there can be no volition, cognition, or reason.
It is a matter of vocabulary whether one considers the mesencephalic tegmentum either as being involved in generating a “capacity for consciousness” or as preparing the brain for the exercise of what Descartes would have considered the “functions of the soul” (volition, cognition, and reason). In either case, the total and irreversible loss of these functions dramatically alters the ontological status of the subject. Descartes specifically considered the example of death. In “La Description du corps humain” (1664) he wrote that “although movements cease in the body when it is dead and the soul departs, one cannot deduce from these facts that the soul produced the movements.” In a formulation of really modern tenor, he then added “one can only infer that the same single cause (a) renders the body incapable of movement and (b) causes the soul to absent itself.” He did not, of course, say that this “same single cause” was the death of the brain stem. Some 300 years later, in 1968, the Harvard Committee spoke of death in terms of “irreversible coma” (where Descartes had spoken of the “now absent soul”) and stressed, as had Descartes, the immobility of the comatose body. The religious and secular terms seem to describe the same reality.
There have been other neurological controversies concerning the locus of the soul. Early in the 18th century Stephen Hales, an English clergyman with a great interest in science, repeated an experiment originally reported by Leonardo da Vinci. Hales tied a ligature around the neck of a frog and cut off its head. The heart continued to beat for a while, as it usually does in the brain dead. Thirty hours later, the limbs of the animal still withdrew when stimulated. In fact, the elicited movements only ceased when the spinal cord itself had been destroyed. This observation gave rise to a great controversy. Reflex action at spinal cord level was not then fully understood, and it was argued that the irritability implied sentience, and that sentience suggested that the soul was still present. The “spinal cord soul” became the subject of much debate. It is now known that such purely spinal reflex movements may occur below a dead brain. It was shown during the 19th century that individuals executed on the guillotine might retain the knee jerk reflex for up to 20 minutes after decapitation.
The church is still concerned with the diagnosis of death, but the theological argument has, during the last half of the 20th century, moved to an entirely different plane. As mentioned earlier, in 1957 Pope Pius XII raised the question whether, in intensive care units, doctors might be “continuing the resuscitation process, despite the fact that the soul may already have left the body.” He even asked one of the central questions confronting modern medicine, namely whether “death had already occurred after grave trauma to the brain, which has provoked deep unconsciousness and central breathing paralysis, the fatal consequences of which have been retarded by artificial respiration.” The answer, he said, “did not fall within the competence of the Church.” Public attitudes
Until about 100 years ago, people had by and large come to terms with death. They usually died in their homes, among their relatives. In villages, in the 18th or early 19th centuries, passers-by might join the priest bearing the last sacrament on his visit to the dying man or woman. Doctors even stressed the public health hazards this might cause. Numerous pictures attest to the fact that children were not excluded from deathbeds, as they were to be during the 20th century.
The general acceptance of death was to be subverted by the advances of modern medicine and by the rapid spread of rationalist thought. This led, during a period of only a few decades, to a striking change of attitudes. In the advanced industrial countries, a large number of people now die in hospitals. The improvement in life expectancy and the advances of modern surgery and medicine have been achieved at a certain price. A mechanistic approach has developed, in which the protraction of dying has become a major by-product of modern technology. The philosophy of modern medicine has been diverted from attention to the sick and has begun to reify the sickness. Instead of perceiving death as something natural, modern physicians have come to see it as bad or alien, a defeat of all their therapeutic endeavours, at times almost as a personal defeat. Sickness is treated with all possible weapons, often without sufficient thought for the sick person—at times even without thought as to whether there is still a “person” at all. The capacity to “care” for biological preparations, with no other human attribute than physical form, is part of the context in which the reevaluation of death described earlier has taken place.
Parallel developments have taken place at the level of the psyche of the dying person and of the person’s relatives. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, an American psychiatrist, has outlined the stages (denial, anger, bargaining, preparatory grief, and acceptance) through which people, informed of their own approaching death, are said to pass. Her writings are based on a wide but essentially American experience, and their universality has not been tested, particularly in other cultural contexts. They may well prove somewhat ethnocentric.
The development of the death industry (satirized in Evelyn Waugh’s Loved One and explored in Jessica Mitford’s American Way of Death) is also a by-product of the technological revolution and of modern attitudes to death. Undertakers have become “morticians” and coffins “caskets.” Embalming has enjoyed a new vogue. Drive-in cemeteries have appeared, for those seeking to reconcile devotion to the dead with other pressing engagements. Cryogenic storage of the corpse has been offered as a means to preserve the deceased in a form amendable to any future therapies that science may devise. Commercial concerns have entered the scene: nonpayment of maintenance charges may result in threats of thawing and putrefaction. In a contentious environment, the law has even invaded the intensive care unit, influencing the decisions of physicians concerning the withdrawal of treatment or the determination of death. A wit has remarked that in the modern era, the only sure sign that a man is dead is that he is no longer capable of litigation.
Citation Information
Article Title: Death
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 30 May 2019