Elisabeth Kubler-Ross: Brief Summary

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was born in Zurich, Switzerland on July 8, 1926 to Ernest and Emmy Kubler and was the oldest of triplets. According to an article by Change the Face of Medicine, the author says that at birth, Kubler only weighed 2 pounds at birth and became hospitalized for most of her childhood. At the age of 5, she became sick with pneumonia, and at the time she was at the hospital, she witnessed one of her friends die in her hospital room; shortly afterwards, her neighbor died from a fractured neck. The author mentions these early experiences to signify Kubler’s encounters with grief. Kubler attributed death as one of the many stages of life and that people should accept and face that outcome, whether it be of their loved one’s

During the war, she became a lab assistant at a hospital, and then a few years later she became an activist for the International Voluntary Service for Peace against the war. The article also states that “just after the liberation of Europe in 1945, she visited Majdanek, a concentration camp, where she met a girl who had been left behind when the gas chambers would not hold another person. Rather than remain bitter, Kübler-Ross recalled, this girl had chosen to forgive and forget. The girl said, “If I can change one person's life from hatred and revenge to love and compassion, then I deserved to survive”. Elisabeth Kübler’s experiences in Poland changed her life forever, since “she decided to spend her life healing

After specializing in psychiatry, she went and became a research assistant at Manhattan State Hospital in a public mental institution (ANB). She then relocated to Chicago and started working at the University of Chicago, becoming a professor at Billing Hospital. The author explains that Kubler mainly studied psychological treatments on the terminally-ill patients with anxiety or patients awaiting death. As a professor, Kubler felt that not many of the professors held direct discussions of death with their patients or students; they wanted to focus more on the recovery of the patients. Kluber felt like discussing death and informing the patients and students of what could happen and how to handle the situation. Discussing death is just as important as discussing the recovery process. Therefore, she held sessions on “Death and Dying.” This attained many people's attention and the sessions soon became very popular and gathered huge