Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926 to 2004) was a Swiss and American psychiatrist, a pioneer in near-death studies, an author, and the developer of the five stages of grief, also known as the Kübler-Ross model. Born in Zurich, one of a set of triplets, she studied medicine at the University of Zurich, graduating in 1957, moved to New York in 1958 and began her psychiatric residency at Manhattan State Hospital in 1959. She later taught at the University of Colorado and the University of Chicago, where her weekly seminars with terminally ill patients led to her 1969 book On Death and Dying. By 1982 she had taught 125,000 students in courses on death and dying. The New York Public Library named the book one of its Books of the Century in 1999, and Time magazine counted her among the 100 most important thinkers of the twentieth century.