Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004), a Swiss-born psychiatrist, began interviewing dying patients in front of medical students and clergy at the University of Chicago's Billings Hospital in the mid-1960s, at a time when many physicians did not tell patients they had cancer. On Death and Dying (1969) reported what the patients said and proposed the five stages of grief, a framework that is now debated but that gave a vocabulary to the experience. The book, a 1969 Life magazine feature and her lectures shifted medical culture towards disclosure and towards care for the dying, and she was an early champion of hospice in the United States, testifying to the Senate in 1972. She later became controversial for her interest in the afterlife, but her early work remains a foundation of psycho-oncology and palliative care.