Bioethics Remembers Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

The American Journal of Bioethics, December 2019, Volume 19, Number 12

For the 50th anniversary of On Death and Dying, The American Journal of Bioethics devoted its December 2019 issue largely to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s work. Its twenty-six pieces, by physicians, nurses, ethicists and scholars, range from warm tribute to careful critique, and a few carry forward questions her book opened for medicine today.

Below are seven pieces to start with, most of them free to read. The complete issue follows.

Fifty Years Later: Reflections on the Work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross M.D.

Barbara Ross Rothweiler and Ken Ross, p. 3

Elisabeth’s children open the issue. Quoting the 1969 text, they show that the stages were meant as a way to recognize and talk about emotional responses that vary within and across people, never as a rigid model, and recall the world she challenged, where dying patients were not told and children could not visit.

“We can help them die by trying to help them live.”

Recollections of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross at the University of Chicago (1965–70)

Mark Siegler, p. 1

A University of Chicago colleague who helped find patients for her weekly seminar recalls the room: the patient at the head of a long table, forty or fifty students and chaplains around it, and within seconds the patient speaking only to her. He calls her the finest interviewer he saw in fifty-three years of practice.

“Dr. Kübler-Ross was an interviewing genius.”

Appreciating the Legacy of Kübler-Ross: One Clinical Ethicist’s Perspective

Daniel O. Dugan, p. 5

A clinical ethicist who first heard her speak in 1973 traces how her work opened the way for hospice, palliative care and clinical ethics. He recalls her warning, at every presentation, never to use the stages to label patients, and offers a critical view of her later work.

“Thanks, Elisabeth.”

First published in AJOB 4:4 (2004), just after her death.

Thirty Years Later: An Oncologist Reflects on Kübler-Ross’s Work

Laurie J. Lyckholm, p. 10

An oncologist who first read On Death and Dying as a nursing student in 1974 reflects on truth-telling, hope and the stages at the bedside, and on the hardest lesson of all: meeting each patient where they are.

“to go to where the patient is, to listen”

First published in AJOB 4:4 (2004).

Psychotherapy at the End of Life

Rebecca M. Saracino, Barry Rosenfeld, William Breitbart and Harvey Max Chochinov, p. 19

Four leading researchers review fifty years of work on suffering at the end of life and the therapies it produced, including Dignity Therapy and Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy. They find support for many of the practices Kübler-Ross recommended, and call her open, nonjudgmental space for talking about death a cornerstone of these treatments.

“it often requires nothing more but an open question”

Everything I Really Needed to Know to Be a Clinical Ethicist, I Learned From Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Mark G. Kuczewski, p. 13

The issue’s lead article. A clinical ethicist traces his vocation to On Death and Dying and argues that it laid the foundation for clinical ethics consultation. He names three tensions it reveals, which ethicists must navigate but never resolve, and is critical of her later work on the afterlife.

“the original bioethicist of the people”

The Premodern Sensibility of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in a Metamodern Age: What On Death and Dying Means Now

Anthony L. Back, p. 35

An oncologist who first read the book while grieving his mother argues that her model still works, but no longer for everyone: patients today follow many different paths through serious illness. What endures, he writes, is the quality of attention she gave the dying.

“a north star I will never forget”