Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth (1926-)

Contemporary physician who has become a world authority on the subject of death and after-death states. Born in Switzerland on July 8, 1926, she worked as a country doctor before moving to the United States. During World War II she spent weekends at the Kantonspital (Cantonai Hospital) in Zürich, where she volunteered to assist escaped refugees. After the war she visited Majdanek concentration camp, where the horrors of the death chambers stimulated in her a desire to help people facing death and to understand the human impulses of love and destruction. She extended her medical background by becoming a practicing psychiatrist. Her formal work with dying patients began in 1965 when she was a faculty member at the University of Chicago. She also conducted research on basic questions concerning life after death at the Manhattan State Hospital, New York. Her studies of death and dying have involved accounts by patients who reported out-of-the-body travel. Her research tends to show that while dying can be painful, death itself is a peaceful condition. Her 1969 text, On Death and Dying, was hailed by her colleagues and also became a popular best-seller.

In 1978 Kübler-Ross helped to found Shanti Nilaya (Final Home of Peace), a healing and growth center in Escondido, California. This was an extension of her well-known "Life-Death and Transition" workshops conducted in various parts of the United States and Canada, involving physicians, nurses, social workers, laypeople, and terminally ill patients. Much of Kübler-Ross's later research was directed toward proving the existence of life after death. Her publication To Live Until We Say Good-bye (1979) was both praised as a "celebration of life" and criticized as "prettifying" the real situation. She has also dealt with issues such as AIDS and "near death" experiences. In the mid-1980s Shanti Nilaya moved from San Diego County, California, to Head Waters, Virginia, where it continues to offer courses and short-and long-term therapeutic sessions.