title: Last Laughs: Gallows Humor and Medical Education.
abstract: This paper argues that "backstage" gallows humor among clinical mentors not only affects medical students' perceptions of what it means to be a doctor but is also symptomatic and indicative of a much larger problem in medicine-namely, the failure to attend fully to the complexity and profundity of the lived experiences of illness, suffering, and death. Reorienting the discourse surrounding gallows humor away from whether or in what context it is acceptable and toward the reasons why doctors feel the need to use such humor in the first place addresses this issue in a more illuminating way.
authors.affiliation: Institute for the Medical Humanities, The University of Texas Medical Branch, 301 University Blvd, Galveston, TX, 77555-1311, USA. nicole.piemonte@gmail.com.|, 527 21st St. #63, Galveston, TX, 77550, USA. nicole.piemonte@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Nicole M
authors.initials: NM
authors.lastname: Piemonte
mesh_terms: D004501:Education, Medical; D006801:Humans; D008611:Mentors; D013337:Students, Medical; D014925:Wit and Humor as Topic
keywords: Death and dying; Gallows humor; Medical education; Medical epistemology; Professionalism