Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a Swiss American psychiatrist who pioneered dozens of studies on the process of death and dying, popularizing the classical “five stages of grief” universally known today. Born in 1926 in Zurich, Switzerland, Kübler-Ross worked as a laboratory assistant in Zurich as a teenager, and provided service and relief efforts throughout Europe during the second World War. Affected deeply by surviving pneumonia during childhood and her experiences during the war, Kübler-Ross was determined to become a doctor, graduating from the University of Zurich in 1957.

After graduating, Kübler-Ross moved to New York in 1958 to continue her work and studies. She accepted a teaching position at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in the 60’s before moving to Chicago in 1965 to teach at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine. While in Chicago, Kübler-Ross founded the now famous seminar on death and dying from which her best-selling first textbook was sourced and written.

Kübler-Ross founded a care center and championed the hospice care movement. She transformed the way terminally ill patients were treated and allowed to die in dignity, given personal and individualized care. She died in a nursing home in 2004 after having had a series of strokes over the last 15 years of her life.