On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy, and Their Own Families
Kübler-Ross and this book captured the nation’s attention and reverberated through the medical and general cultures. The very act of listening delivered illness and dying from the realm of disease and the restricted province of doctors to the realm of lived experience and the personal domain of individuals. When I first read On Death and Dying as a college student aiming toward a career in medicine, I was struck by the interview transcripts that revealed the respect that was evident in Kübler-Ross’s listening and her unpretentious friendliness toward patients.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying challenged the authoritarian decorum and puritanism of the day. In a period in which medical professionals spoke of advanced illness only in euphemisms or oblique whispered comments, here was a doctor who actually talked with people about their illness and, more radically still, carefully listened to what they had to say.
During the socially tumultuous mid-twentieth century, one diminutive Swiss-American psychiatrist had the temerity to give voice to people facing the “end of life. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross held up a mirror to Americans, reflecting their attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors toward people living with a terminal illness. People didn’t like what they saw. Through the medium of On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross added how we die to the agenda of cultural revolutions taking place in realms of the environment, social rights, and health care.
Paperback.
283 pages.
Dimensions: 8.33" x 5.5" .8"
