Employing Greek Laments for the Dead (‘Moirologia’) to Facilitate Medical Students in Their Encounters with Patient Death

Abstract

Patient death has been largely recorded in the literature as one of the most daunting experiences eliciting strong emotional reactions by healthcare professionals in medical settings. In the case of medical students, studies have highlighted their feelings of distress, anxiety, guilt, conflict, sadness and disappointment when witnessing patients’ deaths. Importantly, research has demonstrated undergraduates’ mounting concerns of being unprepared and inadequately trained to confront an (un)expected patient’s death or the grieving family’s reactions. To this end, we propose that lament songs for the dead, known as ‘moirologia’ in the Greek folk tradition, could be employed in undergraduate medical training to assist medical students gain a penetrative insight into the expression of pain, emotional toll, and the bereavement process in the wake of a person’s death. Moirologia was traditionally sung by lamenters next to the deathbed or at the graveside, along with wailing elements, embodying in a tragic way the feelings of sorrow and deprivation. Embedded within a social context, lamentation allowed mourners to articulate their untold suffering, convey their inner emotions and share their pain of loss and separation with the community. Hence, the study of these funeral laments from the narrative medicine lens could assist medical students to make emotional sense of distressing events framed as a public, supportive process—on a par with the lamenters’ grieving group—whereby they can overtly practice important aspects of professionalism, including empathy, compassion and caring. Set within a still ongoing COVID-19 pandemic situation, during which dying has been seriously dehumanised as a lonely process both for healthcare professionals and their patients, it is essential to bring medical students into contact with forms of art that communicate universal experiences of suffering and loss.