“Our society is bent on ignoring or avoiding death. We should all face the reality of death before it faces us. We should make it a habit to think about death and dying occasionally, I hope, before we encounter it in our own life. One who has accepted the reality of his own death can help others to face death”—Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, MD was a great pioneer in the exciting and mysterious field of exploration of ‘Death’. She was widely recognized as one of the foremost authorities in the field of death, dying and transition. It can truly be said that she invented this field as an area of legitimate discourse among the medical community. Her now-classic first book, titled On Death and Dying, published in 1969, is today considered as the master text on the subject, and is required reading in many major medical and nursing schools and graduate schools of psychiatry and theology in different parts of the world. She radiated her influence far beyond the professional fields of Medicine, Psychology and Psychiatry, Neurology and Neuro-psychiatry, Theology etc. Her lectures, workshops, media appearances and books reached and affected millions of people around the world.
Kübler-Ross was born on July 8, 1926 in Zürich, Switzerland, one of a set of identical triplets. She graduated from the University of Zürich medical school in 1957. Dr. Kubler-Ross received her medical degree from the University of Zurich in 1957. She moved to the United States in 1958 to work and continue her studies in New York. She began her pioneering work with the terminally ill at the University of Colorado Medical Center in Denver, and later worked as Clinical Professor of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
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Dr.ELISABETH KUBLER-ROSS (1926-2004) |
As she began her medical practice, she was appalled by the hospital treatment of patients who were dying. She began giving a series of lectures featuring terminally ill patients, forcing medical students to confront people who were dying. Her extensive work with the dying led to On Death and Dying in 1969. She wrote over 20 additional books on the subject of dying.
The first dead-body Elisabeth Kubler-Ross ever saw was that of a neighbour in a village in Switzerland. He had died by falling out of a tree. In the living room of his house he lay in his bed, surrounded by family and friends. Elisabeth, then a child, was allowed to touch him; her father chatted to him, as though he were still alive. That, Elisabeth decided then and there, was the proper way to deal with death. Even better was the Mexican way, camping on graves on the Dia de los Muertos to picnic and make merry with the dead. No doubt these were oddities. By the beginning of the 20th century, acceptance of death as an integral part of life, had been largely forgotten in Western Cultures. People no longer dared look death in the face, and no longer had to.
When Dr. Kubler-Ross arrived at the Manhattan State Hospital in 1958, she was shocked to find that the dying were kept isolated, in distant wards where Nurses did not have to hear their constant, hopeless ringing of the bell. Medical Doctors viewed such dying human beings as failures in an age where every infection and disease seemed to have found its cure. What was worse was that only a few wanted to talk to them. The then prevailing logic was that if there was no good prognosis, there seemed nothing honest to say or to be said. Even the pain of the dying was indifferently dealt with by the Medical, Para-medical and Nursing Staff. It was Dr. Kubler-Ross, who with great courage, vision and imagination set out to change this inhuman attitude. While serving as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago Medical School, she started a programme to bring dying patients to her Seminars/Workshops. The students, shocked and embarrassed, would mumble polite questions about treatment; the dying patients, full of passion and anger, oftentimes spoke of the weddings and children they would never have. Next, Dr. Kubler-Ross brought her students together in a room to watch, through one-way glass, as she encouraged terminal patients to say what they felt about death. Some students could not watch at all, but ran away. These interviews became the subject matter of the book “On Death and Dying” which came out first in 1969 and made Dr. Kubler-Ross both famous and influential. In a brilliant introductory chapter ‘On the fear of Death’, she wrote “Medicine has changed greatly in the last decades.....Better child-care and education have effected a low morbidity and mortality among children. The many diseases that have taken an impressive toll among the young and middle-aged have been conquered. The number of old people is on the rise, and with this fact come the number of people with malignancies and chronic diseases associated more with old age..... Physicians have more people in their waiting rooms with emotional problems than they have ever had before, but they also have more elderly patients who not only try to live with their decreased physical abilities and limitations but who also face loneliness and isolation with all its pains and anguish. The majority of these patients are not seen by a Psychiatrist. Their needs have to be elicited and gratified by other professional people, for instance, Chaplains and social workers. It is for them that I am trying to outline the changes that have taken place in the last few decades, changes that are ultimately responsible for the increased fear of death, the rising number of emotional problems, and the greater need for understanding of and coping with the problems of Death and Dying”.
In her maiden book on “On Death and Dying”, she listed Five Stages through which, in her experience, the dying passed. The first stage was denial; the second, anger; the third, bargaining, in which the patient tried to do his best to extend the time left to him; the fourth depression, when the bargain failed to work; and the fifth, stoical acceptance.
In 1979 the Ladies’ Home Journal honoured her with a Woman of the Decade Award, after having named her Woman of the Year in Science and Research in 1977. She has also been the recipient of other honors and awards too numerous to mention.
Even a partial list of her superb books would be lengthy: Questions and Answers on Death and Dying; To Live Until We Say Goodbye; Living With Death and Dying; Working It Through; Death, The Final Stage of Growth; On Children and Death; and AIDS:The Ultimate Challenge.
In 1989 Dr Daniel Redwood had an interview with Dr. Kubler-Ross. During the course of this interview Dr. Kubler-Ross described her strikingly powerful experience as a young woman visiting a concentration camp just after the liberation of Germany in 1945, an experience which was to shape the future course of her life. In this context, she addressed the highly controversial idea, first raised to her by a young Jewish camp survivor, that there was an aspect of Hitler in all of us. Recognizing the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust, she raised troubling questions on the nature of human evil and the roots from which it sprang. She also shared her thoughts on the fear, denial and uncertainty which characterize much of modern Western humanity’s approach to death.
In later life, Kubler-Ross became interested in out-of-body experiences and mediumistic attempts to contact the dead. This led to a scandal connected with one medium, as well as attacks on her healing centers. Kübler-Ross suffered a series of strokes in 1995 which left her partially paralyzed on her left side. In a 2002 interview with The Arizona Republic, she stated that she was ready for death. She died in 2004 at her home in Scottsdale, Arizona.
When Elisabeth Kubler Ross passed away in 2004, The Economist of London paid this obituary tribute to her “More important, however, than those Stages of Dying(described by her in her maiden book)—which seemed, to some, too arbitrary, and likely to delude patients that death was within their control—was her argument for better treatment of the dying. By forcing the American Medical Establishment to look at death, Dr. Kubler-Ross did more than anyone else to push forward the hospice movement, living wills, proper palliative care and the notion of death with dignity (though she passionately opposed euthanasia, and refused when her own mother asked her to help her die. In so far as any one could, she made death better. It ought, she said, to be ‘one of the greatest experiences ever’ “.
Dr. Kubler-Ross was greatly influenced by the poems of Rabindranath Taogre (1861-1941) in his famous work ‘Gitanjali’ and other works. Almost every chapter in her famous maiden book called “On Death and Dying” carried a quotation from the writings of Tagore. She was very fond of the following lines of Tagore in his “Stray Birds”:
‘Death belongs to life as birth does The walk is in the raising of the foot as in the laying of it down’ The first chapter of her first great book on Death and Dying carried the following quotation from Tagore’s work ‘Fruit-Gathering’ :
Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facingthem.Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain but for the heart to
conquer it.Let me not look for allies in life’s battlefield but to my own strength. Let me not crave in anxious fear tobe saved but hope for the patience to win my freedom. Grant me that I may not be acoward, feeling your mercy in mysuccess alone; but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure” 
