User:Cool Pharmacy/sandbox

History
The definition of death has changed over time, but cardiac and neurological death have been main criteria for centuries. The concept of flatlining begins to take form with the invention of technologies for death determination.

In 1837, Professor Manni at the University of Rome offered a cash prize to the doctor who could offer a true test of death. The winner, Dr. Eugene Bouchut used new technology– the stethoscope– to determine death when heart sounds were absent for over two minutes. In 1883 he updated his criteria to require five minutes without heart sounds to qualify cardiac death.

Then, the standard for viewing cardiac activity changed in 1887 when Augustus Waller recorded the first ECG from the human heart with a mercury capillary electrometer. This sparked research into modern ECG technology, which was developed from the mercury capillary electrometer by Einthoven and won a Nobel Prize in 1924. With this, the characteristics of a dying heart were identified, creating the leading tool for diagnosing death– even to this day.

However, in the mid 19th century with the invention of the defibrillator and cardioversion, it was realized that the flatline on the ECG did not always mean death. This instigated research into other ways to determine death, which eventually lead to the idea of brain death.

In 1924, a German physiologist and psychiatrist Hans Berger recorded the first EEG on a human. (cite) The machine consisted of steel electrodes that get mounted on the scalp with an EEG cap to visualize and interpret signals. (13) He noted that the human brain has a specific pattern, called alpha oscillations, and went on to publish this in 1929. (cite 2) The presence of this technology along with resuscitation technology saw the use of the EEG to determine a time in which the person had reached total death. In 1959, this concept– brain death– was first coined as: "le coma dépassé by Mollaret and Goulon. (cite) They determined that a person reached this state when they were apneic, comatose, without brainstem reflexes, and showed no electroencephalographic (EEG) activity. (cite).