The Principles The first section of the “Final Exam” by Pauline W. Chen was the “Principles,” which will later be the foundation of doctors. The “Principles” focuses on death, which includes human dissection, pronouncement of death, and care of terminal patients. However, while laying the foundation for becoming a doctor, the medical students weren’t given a chance to mentally prepare to experience death. The “Principles” desensitized students to death, require students to handle death as a professional not as a person, and students learn poor terminal patients care and after death care from the residents and the physicians. In chapter one, the medical students were desensitized to death by performing cadaver dissection. Medical students…show more content… The first death that Chen saw was during her third-year in medical school in her first year of clinical rotation, she observed Code Blue for learning purposes and she learned that it was nothing like the movie and someone did end up dying. To the fourth-year students, the interns, the residents, and the attending physicians who have more clinical experiences “dying patients were clinical events and an opportunity to learn” (Chen, 2007, 46). For them death is not something to cry or to be sad about because it happens frequently and it goes hand-in-hand with their career. After Bill and Chen declared someone dead, Bill said “isn’t it easy?” (Chen, 2007, 53) and Chen was disturbed by his statement, but to Bill this is just boring job that he has to do. A research shows that “medical students had emotionally powerful reactions to death, but because of lack of discussion or emotional reaction, students often inferred that avoidance and continuing with work were appropriate coping reactions” (Phodes-Kropf, 2005, 634-40). The impact of this is that when medical students become a physician, they will be less emotional or less humane about their patients dying and move on with their