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Not every nineteen-year-old is ready to confront his own mortality. "My
estimation is that the students who take this class are the most
courageous students on campus," says Deborah Gold, an associate
professor of medical sociology. "It is not an easy class to
take because of the unavoidable emotional aspects of death or dying."
The course, which Gold offers every fall, draws a diverse group
of undergraduates, including would-be doctors, people who hope
to manage their fear of death, and students who have recently lost
a friend, a family member, or a pet. Gold began teaching the course
in the tumultuous fall of 2001. "Class started the last weekend
of August, and in eleven days September 11 happened, so I had the
material for the whole rest of the semester right there," she
says.
"Death and Dying" is a LEAPS (Learning through Experience,
Action, Partnership, and Service) class, so it combines readings
and research papers with weekly community service. Volunteer assignments
are tailored to each student's interests and comfort level with
death, and range from retirement homes to the cancer wards at Duke
Medical Center. "We try really hard to match the student to
a level of readiness," Gold says. "If I have a person
who's really afraid of dying, I'm not going to send them to a hospice."
Several years ago, one student witnessed eleven deaths in a single
semester, working alongside a hospital chaplain at the medical
center. She is now a third-year medical student at Case Western
Reserve University and has told Gold that the experience prepared
her emotionally for encountering death in medical school.
Cultural attitudes to death have changed with improved medicine,
Gold says, and death has been isolated and quarantined in hospitals
and nursing homes. "Back in the 1900s there was no correlation
between age and death. You were as likely to die at five as you
were to die at twenty or eighty.
"As our public-health situation has improved, we've pushed
death later and later into life and made it much more distant from
the everyday lives of individuals. It's amazing to me how few students
have been to a funeral, how few have seen a dead body."
Yaolin Zhou '06 said taking "Death and Dying" helped
her face a potentially life-threatening operation in the spring
of her senior year. "I was so much more at peace with the
possibility that I was going to die," says Zhou, now a first-year
student at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine. "I knew what
I was going to write for my advance directive."
Professor
Deborah Gold earned a B.A. with
majors in English and Latin from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign in 1973, her M.Ed. from the National College of
Education in 1979, and a Ph.D. in human development and social
policy from Northwestern University in 1986. She is an associate
professor of medical sociology at Duke Medical Center and director
of the Human Development Program.
Prerequisites
None
Readings
Weekly readings from journal articles,
novels, and psychological and sociological texts
Assignments
A preliminary paper on why students
chose to take the class, a service-learning research proposal,
reflections on community service, and a final research paper
— Jared Mueller '09 |
