5. Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Achievements:

Pioneer in the study of death, dying, and grief,

Established the five phases that dying people experience – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance (the Kübler-Ross model).

Born in 1926 in Zurich, Switzerland, Dr. Ross’ career almost ended before it even started because her father forbade her from becoming a doctor. He told her that she could become either a secretary in his business or a maid.

Little did he know that she had the makings of a brilliant scientist. Her dogged determination to pursue this career path helped her become one of the most famous female doctors in history. She left home at 16, and together with many brave women, served as a hospital volunteer during World War II. Six years after the war ended, in 1951, she finally enrolled in medical school.

Image Source: IPerceptive.com

Throughout her illustrious career in psychiatry, Dr. Ross focused, particularly on terminal illness. Her groundbreaking book On Death and Dying, published in 1969, describes the five stages that dying patients go through, namely denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Her book revolutionized how the medical community approach terminally-ill patients and helped improve end of life care.

Her research in the issue of terminal illness was inspired by several personal experiences that marked her for life. She had fragile health as a child. As a triplet, she weighed only two pounds when she and her siblings were born. The second experience that marked her was a visit to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, where she saw the hundreds of drawings of butterflies carved into some of the walls by the prisoners. This made her think about the issue of death and the fragility of life.

In 1962, she found work as a teacher at the University of Colorado Medical School. While working there, she was both disturbed and surprised at how terminally ill patients were treated in the United States and that there was no subject addressing death and dying in the medical school curriculum.

Her experiences inspired her later work and research, which helped improve the conditions of dying patients and how terminally ill individuals were treated and perceived in general.

In 2007, she was recognized as one of the most influential women in history, becoming an inductee into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.