Dr. James Bernat, an internationally recognized medical ethicist, is a professor of neurology at Dartmouth Medical School and head of the Ethics Committee at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. To read more about Bernat and his work, read the feature article "On the Other Hand..."

In 1997, and again in 2006, Bernat was one of several scholars invited to Rome to advise the Vatican on how to define death. Reporters from prominent media outlets--from the New York Times to People magazine--often ask him to comment on major ethics cases, especially those involving brain death. He was quoted widely, for example, on Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who lived for 15 years in a permanent vegetative state. Her husband, her parents, and the courts fought a very public battle over whether to remove her feeding tube and let her die naturally. Terri Schiavo died in 2005.

Dartmouth Medicine associate editor Laura Stephenson Carter spoke to Bernat about his work on medical ethics.

Audio

• Dr. James Bernat talks about brain death and other ethical matters

Text

• A History Of Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center's Ethics Committee
• Advance Directives