Educating medical students about death and dying.

Doctors in every branch of medicine must from time to time deal with patients who are dying or who have life threatening illnesses.Many young doctors avoid facing their own feelings about death, finding them stressful.1When patients die we are perhaps re- minded of the certainty of our own deaths.In 1915 Freud2 wrote: 'Our own death is indeed unimaginable ... at bottom no-one believes in his own death, or to put the same thing in another way, in the unconscious everyone of us is convinced of his own immortality'.An inability to acknowledge death in a personal sense may account in part for our difficulty in approaching the subject3 and everybody has some degree of anxiety about death.This comes in part from the irreversibility of death, and in part from the impossibility of that experience being conveyed to others.5We live in a society that rejects death, and doctors may have a greater need than others to do so.6Some