Article from Homiletic & Pastoral Review posted here for our members.  Read and reviewed by the NACN-USA Ethics Committee. 1968 was a year of upheaval, perhaps best remembered by Americans for the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, and by Catholics for the promulgation of Humanae vitae. But the unobtrusive coining of a new definition should be included with these momentous events, for it changed medical practice by shifting the boundary between life and death. In 1968 the Harvard Medical School Ad Hoc Committee introduced the oxymoronic definition “irreversible coma [...]