A medical school course in coping with death: an opportunity to consider some basic health care issues

Courses on death and related topics are frequently considered nonessential in medical school curricula; however medical students and residents often express their feelings of unpreparedness to cope with deaths of their patients, surviving family members and their own feelings about death. This paper describes a short, elective course taught by a single instructor who, by writing about it, wishes to encourage others to begin to fill this gap in medical education. Student evaluations and representative reaction comments are included.