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F rom December 12, 2013 to June 18, 2018, the case of Jahi McMath received international attention, as physicians, courts, and bioethicists insisted she was dead, while her mother insisted she was alive and waged a relentless battle to keep her so. As of August 2018, a search on “Jahi McMath” yielded 260 articles in Google Scholar and 1,695 newspaper articles in Nexis Uni (Lewis 2018). Jahi was the focus of a special session of the conference “Defining Death,” sponsored by the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School on April 11, 2018 (Goodwin 2018; HMS Center for Bioethics 2018; Shewmon 2018b; Truog 2018). Jahi is the only person in history to be issued two death certificates four and a half years apart, both of which remain on official record. The many commentators on her case obtained their facts from the news media or publicly available court documents. This is the first presentation of the medical details, taken directly from her medical records. Jahi’s name and data are presented with the explicit permission of her mother, Nailah Winkfield. The names of the hospitals where she was treated are already public knowledge. Source Material Complete records from Jahi’s three main hospital admissions, plus those from home nurses and her primary physician, were provided to the first author in the form of 55 PDF files of scanned printouts of electronic hospital records and outpatient notes, totaling 60,456 PDF pages. Relevant data were entered manually into several large Excel spreadsheets, from which the graphs shown below were derived. Neuroimages and EEG tracings were provided on separate compact discs. Case History Jahi’s story sorts naturally into four chapters: (1) initial admission to Children’s Hospital of Oakland, California (CHO); (2) transfer to St. Peter’s University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey (SPUH); (3) discharge to a nearby apartment; and (4) final admission to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey (RWJUH). Chapter 1. Children’s Hospital of Oakland Jahi was 13 years old when admitted to CHO on December 9, 2013, for elective surgery to treat obstructive sleep apnea related to obesity. That afternoon she underwent adenotonsillectomy, uvulopalatopharyngoplasty, and submucous re-section of the bilateral inferior turbinates. The operation was uncomplicated. She was transferred to the intensive care...





