Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth 1926-

A Societal Taboo on Discussion of Death.

When Swiss-born psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published her 1969 best-selling book, On Death and Dying, most people in the United States, including those in the medical profession, were reluctant to confront death openly. Kübler-Ross found that medical professionals typically abandoned the dying patient. They dropped in occasionally to see how things were going but spent as little time as possible with the terminally ill. Even for physicians, death was a taboo subject.

The Five Stages of Dying.

In her series of conversations with dying patients, Dr. Kübler-Ross identified five main stages through which terminally ill patients pass. The first stage is Denial, the "not me" phase when the patient is unwilling or unable to accept the fact of imminent death. Anger, the "why me?" stage, sets in when symptoms make further denial impossible. The...

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