Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (July 8, 1926 to August 24, 2004) was a Swiss and American psychiatrist, a pioneer in near-death studies, and the author who developed the five stages of grief, also known as the Kübler-Ross model. She worked in a 20th-century medical culture that often kept dying patients at a distance, treating them as cases rather than as people. Her writing and teaching helped bring death, grief, and terminal illness into open conversation in hospitals, classrooms, seminaries, and homes.

She was born Elisabeth Kübler in Zurich, Switzerland, into a Protestant Christian family. One of triplets, she weighed only 2 pounds at birth, and later said she survived because of her mother’s love and attentiveness. As a teenager during World War II, she worked as a laboratory assistant for refugees in Zurich. She wanted to become a doctor despite her father’s effort to make her a secretary in his business, and she left home at 16. On May 8, 1945, at 18, she joined the International Voluntary Service as an activist.

In 1947, Kübler-Ross visited the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. The stories of survivors shaped her understanding of compassion and human resilience. So did the images of hundreds of butterflies carved into some of the walls there, final works of art by children facing death. After returning to Zurich, she worked as an apprentice for Dr. Kan Zehnder at the Canton Hospital, supported herself through different jobs, gained experience in hospitals, and volunteered to aid refugees. She studied medicine at the University of Zurich and graduated in 1957.

After moving to New York in 1958, Kübler-Ross began her psychiatric residency at Manhattan State Hospital on July 6, 1959. She created treatments for patients with schizophrenia and for terminal patients then labeled “hopeless.” Her programs aimed to restore dignity and self-respect, reduce over-sedation, and help patients relate to the outside world. She was disturbed by the neglect and abuse she saw among psychiatric patients and the imminently dying. Her focus on individual care led to significant improvement in the mental health of 94 percent of her patients.

In 1962, she joined the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver, completed a fellowship, and served on the faculty. She later moved to Chicago, completed her training in psychiatry in 1963, and in 1965 became an instructor at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine. There she began weekly educational seminars with live interviews of terminally ill patients, despite resistance from medical staff. Her 1966 article, “The Dying Patient as Teacher: An Experiment and an Experience,” led to a Macmillan contract. On Death & Dying was published in November 1969 and quickly became a best-seller.

By 1970, Kübler-Ross had delivered the Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard University, focusing on On Death and Dying. By July 1982, she had taught 125,000 students in death and dying courses across colleges, seminaries, medical schools, hospitals, and social-work institutions. In 1999, the New York Public Library named On Death and Dying one of its “Books of the Century,” and Time magazine listed her among the “100 Most Important Thinkers” of the 20th century. Her words still speak because they insist on something simple and humane: people at the end of life deserve to be seen, heard, and treated with care.