The Principal Investigator in this application requests support to finish writing a book on the history of changing meanings of death from 1740 to 1990. This book will show that disagreements over the meaning of death long predated the 1960s, and that such debates never were simply products of new technical knowledge. From the intense fear in the 18th and 19th centuries that people were mistakenly being buried alive to current controversies over brain death, death long has been a contested and changing construct, shaped by scientific discoveries in resuscitation and vivisection, changing social powers of the medical profession, and changing cultural values. Most historians have focussed on the care of the dying or the rituals of mourning rather than on the meanings of death itself. Several works examine the recent history of brain death, but none adequately links that issue to prior centuries of debate over death. In the proposed book the Investigator will demonstrate that death has a long intricate history. By making visible the changeability of past definitions, he will also in this study help clarify how medicine and culture intersect to frame the brain death debate today. The multi-disciplinary methods for this project combine research in the technical history of fields like anesthesia, physiology, transplantation, and resuscitation; the social history of medical professionalism; and the cultural history of representations of death. Sources range from old medical journals to vintage motion pictures. This unique combination of methods is essential to trace the interactions between the biological and cultural aspects of defining death.
