Wednesday, August 25, 2004
PHOENIX (AP) - Elisabeth
Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist
who revolutionized the way
the world looks at terminally
ill patients with her book On
Death and Dying and later as
a pioneer for hospice care, has
died. She was 78.
She died Tuesday of natural
causes at her Scottsdale home,
family members said.
Published in 1969, On Death
and Dying focused on the
needs of the dying and
offered her theory that they
go through five stages of grief
-denial, anger, bargaining,
depression and acceptance.
"Those who learned to know death, rather than to fear and fight it, become our teachers about life,"
she once wrote. In another passage, she wrote: "Dying is nothing to fear. It can be the most
wonderful experience of your life. It all depends on how you have lived."
Kubler-Ross wrote 12 books after On Death and Dying, including how to deal with the death of a
child and an early study on the AIDS epidemic.
"She brought the taboo notion of death and dying into the public consciousness," said Stephen
Connor, vice-president of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.
In 1979, she received the Ladies' Home Journal Woman of the Decade Award. In 1999, Time
magazine named Kubler-Ross as one of the 100 Most Important Thinkers of the past century.
Born in Zurich, Switzerland, Kubler-Ross graduated from medical school at the University of
Zurich in 1957. She came to New York the following year and was appalled by hospital treatment of
dying patients.
"Whoever has seen the horrifying appearance of the postwar European concentration camps would
be similarly preoccupied," she said.
She began her work with the terminally ill at the University of Colorado Medical Center in Denver,
and was a clinical professor of behavioural medicine and psychiatry at the University of Virginia in
Charlottesville.
Kubler-Ross began giving lectures featuring terminally ill patients, who talked about what they were
going through. That led to her 1969 book.
"Dying becomes lonely and impersonal because the patient is often taken out of his familiar
environment and rushed to an emergency room," she wrote.
"He may cry for rest, peace and dignity, but he will get infusions, transfusions, a heart machine, or
tracheostomy. ¬Ý.¬Ý.¬Ý. He will get a dozen people around the clock, all busily preoccupied with his heart
rate, pulse, electrocardiogram or pulmonary functions, his secretions or excretions -but not with him
as a human being."
Kubler-Ross is survived her two children, Kenneth Ross and Barbara Lee Ross, and two
granddaughters.
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― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 25 August 2004 12:26 (twenty-one years ago)
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