Introduction:

the study of death involves the exploration in the search of oneself. Medicine tends to deny death and control it through technological advances and medicalization, leading to the thought that the doctor can regulate the duration of the process. Death is full of symbolic meanings and it is an important part of the human development process, often unknown by the medical students, which makes them fearful for not knowing when this meeting is going to happen. It is inherent to the doctor’s activities, believing it can be always avoided, being understood as a failure or unsuccessful treatment, or lack of knowledge by the professional, generating anxiety and demands, by the population and the doctors themselves. This research aims to report the experience and perception of death among medical students.

Methods:

it is a qualitative, observational study carried out with 50 students from three different semesters from a School of Medicine in the state of Alagoas, Brazil, in 2018. It was applied an instrument with an open question: After the experience of death during the course, what has changed in your performance as a student and in your life? The data was analyzed manually during four steps. The first phase consisted of organizing the data, looking for ideas that emerged from the answers to the guiding question, when the pre-analysis was carried out, through a deep reading aiming to define categories, since they had not been previously created; the second phase corresponded to the preparation of the second worksheet that stored the explicit and implicit ideas, the former being the temporary categories and the latter being the focus along with identification of the senses; the third phase sought to answer the study question through the record units, associating the speech to the focus/theme, identifying the sense of inference; the fourth phase was based on two spreadsheets, the first one with the interpretation of the main topics and their record units, and the second one with the creation of the synthesis for each focus. The experience of death may occur in relation to the other or to death itself, with differences between them. This research focus on the death of others and how undergraduate medical students experience it during the course, of which data resulted in three categories related to the experience of death during medical school, reflecting their capacity or not to deal with the phenomenon.

Results:

the three categories showed two subcategories, as follows: Acceptance of death, with subcategories in personal and professional life; Professional qualification with two subcategories: limits of professional performance and of the course in relation to death. The last category was Humanization, with two more subcategories: medical-patient relationship and palliative care.

Conclusion:

the research showed that the students modified their views about death during the course, and that they are aware of the topic, disclosing the value of this subject and also the need to discuss it during undergraduate school.

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