Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (July 8, 1926 – August 24, 2004) was a Swiss-American psychiatrist, a pioneer in near-death studies, and author of the internationally best-selling book, On Death and Dying (1969), where she first discussed her theory of the five stages of grief, also known as the "Kübler-Ross model".

Elisabeth Kübler was born on July 8, 1926, in Zürich, Switzerland, into a Protestant Christian Family.

She was one of a set of triplets, two of whom were identical.

Her life was jeopardized due to complications, weighing only 2 pounds at birth, but she said she survived due to her mother's love and attentiveness.

Elisabeth later contracted pneumonia and was hospitalized at age 5, during which she had her first experience with death as her roommate died peacefully.

Her early experiences with death led her to believe that, because death is a necessary stage of life, one must be prepared to face it with dignity and peace.

During World War II, at only 13 years of age, Elisabeth worked as a laboratory assistant for refugees in Zürich.

Following the war, she did relief work in France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

She would later visit the Majdanek extermination camp in Poland in 1947, which sparked her interest in the power of compassion and resilience of the human spirit.

The horror stories of the survivors left permanent impressions on Elisabeth, and led to her decision in dedicating her life to the help and healing of others.

She was also profoundly affected by the images of hundreds of butterflies carved into some of the walls there.

To Kübler-Ross, the butterflies—these final works of art by those facing death—stayed with her for years and influenced her thinking about the end of life.

During this same year, she also became involved with the International Voluntary Service for peace as an activist.

From a young age, Elisabeth was determined to become a doctor despite her father's efforts in forcing her to become a secretary for his business.

She refused him and left home at 16.

She began working as a housemaid for a mean woman, where she met a doctor who wished to help her in becoming a doctor.

She then worked as an apprentice for a Dr. Braun, a scientist in her hometown, up until he went bankrupt.

Here, she remembered getting her first lab coat with her name on it.

Then, she worked for a dermatologist named Dr. Kan Zehnder.

After this time she worked to support herself in a variety of jobs, gaining major experience in hospitals while volunteering to provide aid to refugees.

Following this she went on to attend the University of Zurich to study medicine, and graduated in 1957.

After graduating from the University of Zurich in 1957, Kübler-Ross moved to New York in 1958 to work and continue her studies.

She began her psychiatric residency in the Manhattan State Hospital in the early 1960s, and began her career working to create treatment for those who were schizophrenic along with those faced with the title "hopeless patient", a term used at the time to reference terminal patients.

These treatment programs would work to restore the patient's sense of dignity and self-respect.

Kübler-Ross also intended to reduce the medications that kept these patients overly sedated, and found ways to help them relate to the outside world.

During this time, Ross was horrified by the neglect and abuse of mental patients as well as the imminently dying.

She found that the patients were often treated with little care or completely ignored by the hospital staff.

This realization made her strive to make a difference in the lives of these individuals.

She developed a program that focused on the individual care and attention for each patient.

This program worked incredibly well, and resulted in significant improvement in the mental health of 94% of her patients.

In 1962, she accepted a position at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

There, Kübler-Ross worked as a junior faculty member and gave her first interview of a young terminally ill woman in front of a roomful of medical students.

Her intentions were not to be an example of pathology, but she wanted to depict a human being who desired to be understood as she was coping with her illness and how it has impacted her life.

She stated to her students:

"Now you are reacting like human beings instead of scientists. Maybe now you'll not only know how a dying patient feels but you will also be able to treat them with compassion – the same compassion that you would want for yourself"

Kübler-Ross completed her training in psychiatry in 1963, and moved to Chicago in 1965.

She sometimes questioned the practices of traditional psychiatry that she observed.

In 1970, she delivered an Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard University on the theme On Death and Dying.

By July 1982, Kübler-Ross had taught 125,000 students in death and dying courses in colleges, seminaries, medical schools, hospitals, and social-work institutions.

Kübler-Ross was a 2007 inductee into the National Women's Hall of Fame, was named by Time as one of the "100 Most Important Thinkers" of the 20th century and was the recipient of nineteen honorary degrees.