ABSTRACT
Medical education has offered little help to the medical student encountering death for the first time. In fact, discussion of death is conspicuous by its absence. The medical student’s first professional encounter with the dead human body comes in the anatomy course during his first year of school, often in the first week. A specialty in which death is particularly poignant is obstetrics and gynecology. The United States has a higher perinatal death rate than most other Western nations and ranks eighteenth in the world. Surgical subspecialists such as neurosurgeons and cardiac surgeons accept death as an everyday reality, in contrast to the general surgeons’ relatively infrequent loss of patients. High mortality rates are often associated with new radical operations on vital organs. In general, the medical profession seems to have little interest in the consequences of death for physicians, other medical personnel, and medical institutions.
