Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (born Elisabeth Kübler, Swiss Standard German: [ˈkyːblər]; July 8, 1926 – August 24, 2004) was a Swiss and American psychiatrist, a pioneer in near-death studies, author, and developer of the five stages of grief, also known as the "Kübler-Ross model".
In 1970, Kübler-Ross delivered the Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard University, focusing on her book, On Death and Dying (1969). 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. In 1999, the New York Public Library named On Death and Dying one of its "Books of the Century", and Time magazine recognized her as one of the "100 Most Important Thinkers" of the 20th century. Throughout her career, Kübler-Ross received over 100 awards, including twenty honorary degrees, and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2007. In 2024, Simon & Schuster released a list of their 100 most notable books, including Kübler-Ross's On Death & Dying.
Elisabeth Kübler was born on July 8, 1926, in Zurich, 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.
During World War II, at only thirteen years of age, Kübler-Ross worked as a laboratory assistant for refugees in Zurich. From a young age, she 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. On May 8, 1945, at the age of eighteen, she joined the International Voluntary Service as an activist.
In 1947, Kübler visited the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, an experience that profoundly affected her understanding of compassion and the resilience of the human spirit. The harrowing stories of survivors left an indelible mark on her, inspiring her life's mission to assist and heal 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 children facing death—stayed with her for years and influenced her thinking about the end of life.
After returning to Zurich, Kübler-Ross worked for a dermatologist named Dr. Kan Zehnder at the Canton Hospital as an apprentice. 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 commenced her psychiatric residency in the Manhattan State Hospital on July 6, 1959, marking the beginning of her career working by creating her own treatments 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 psychiatric 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 in Denver where she completed a fellowship and served on the faculty. There, as a junior faculty member, she 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. She also undertook 39 months of classical psychoanalysis training in Chicago. She became an instructor at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine, where she began to conduct a regular weekly educational seminar consisting of live interviews with terminally ill patients. She had her students participate in these despite a large amount of resistance from the medical staff.
By 1966, Kübler-Ross was giving regular weekly seminars on dying patients at her hospital. In late 1966, she wrote a seventeen-page article titled "The Dying Patient as Teacher: An Experiment and an Experience" for the December issue of The Chicago Theological Seminary Journal, which was themed "On Death and Dying". Although she expressed concerns about her English proficiency, the editor reassured her. Despite the journal's limited circulation, a copy of her article reached an editor at Macmillan Publishing Company in New York City. Consequently, on July 7, 1967, Macmillan offered Kübler-Ross a contract to expand her work into a 256-page book titled On Death & Dying. Coincidentally, just six days later, on July 13, 1967, St. Christopher's Hospice, the first modern hospice, admitted its inaugural patient. The book was officially registered with the US copyright office on May 19, 1969. Despite delays, the book was eventually published in November 1969 and quickly became a best-seller, profoundly altering her life. Notably, as of December 18, 1976, On Death & Dying remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for trade paperbacks, listing at #3.
In November 1969, Life magazine ran an article on Kübler-Ross, bringing public awareness to her work outside of the medical community. The response was enormous and influenced Kübler-Ross's decision to focus her career on working with the terminally ill and their families. The intense scrutiny her work received also had an impact on her career path. Kübler-Ross stopped teaching at the university to work privately on what she called the "greatest mystery in science"—death.
During the 1970's, Kübler-Ross became a champion of the worldwide hospice movement. She traveled to over twenty countries on six continents initiating various hospice and palliative care programs. In 1970, Kübler-Ross spoke at the prestigious Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard University on the subject of death and dying. On August 7, 1972, she spoke to the United States Senate Special Committee on Aging to promote the "Death With Dignity" movement. In 1977, she was named "Woman of the Year" by Ladies' Home Journal. In 1978, Kübler-Ross cofounded the American Holistic Medical Association.
Kübler-Ross was one of the central figures in the hospice care movement, believing that euthanasia prevents people from completing their "unfinished business".
In 1977, she founded "Shanti Nilaya" (Home of Peace) on forty acres of land in Escondido, California. At this time, Kübler-Ross began conducting "Life, Death, and Transition (LTD) workshops with the goal of assisting people to resolve their "unfinished business", using Shanti Nilaya as a setting for some of these five-day workshops. She also intended it as a healing center for the dying and their families. She was also a co-founder of the American Holistic Medical Association during this time period.