I first read this book when it was originally published & I thank my beautiful friend who gave this to me as a gift.

Death & dying are still today very controversial topics which is a shame - no one can avoid this event.

Many people may find this book displeasing as it may trigger responses and opposition stemming from religious/political views, if not controversial to one’s way of life.

However, if one can observe, have an open mind and heart it is filled with comfort and will likely extended into thoughts of changing or viewing life and interactions with others differently.

I have recently reread this book again and yes I now work in this field, indirectly at the beginning of life and now more involved.

I encourage all to read this book, even if it at first it just sits alongside other reading material.

For you never know who else in your home or work may find this text and be drawn to it.

Wishing you all well - enjoy

I read this book, and wished, oh I wished, that I had read it when my mother was dying. I can see all the points that I would change so clearly, the advice I would have taken. And I feel bitter that no one was there to tell me how to take care of her when I was alone in that house with her for weeks. I can think of all the meaningful discussions we might have had, and the comfort I could have given her. It's frustrating and heartbreaking more than words.

I honestly believe that all medical staff should read this book as well. When my mom was dying, we met all sorts of doctors: the doctors that gave no hope and the doctors that were positive. We met all sorts of nurses, and I agree, the kindness that we were shown meant everything. Everything.

I also felt, while walking home last night, that after reading this book I was less afraid of my own eventual death. That it is completely natural. And this is a big step for me, because after seeing my mother die, I have been plagued with anxiety and panic attacks. I feel very peaceful now in comparison to what I have felt.

I am thankful that this book helped spur the creation of hospice care. I can't imagine what my mother's death would have been like without it.

I do think that this book is a little outdated in terms of certain terminology and gender roles, but the basis of it is good. It makes sense, and it's important. This book was very, very important.

This book is a sample of three seminars about life, death and the transition between both delivered by Dr. Kübler-Ross, an eminence in Near-death studies and a pioneer in researching the five stages of grief. Ross’ work mingles spirituality with rigorous science and has helped hundreds of dying people of all ages, particularly children, and their families to make peace with death and to accept it as a door to another sort of existence.
According to Dr. Ross’ observations, right after death, the body becomes an empty chrysalis and some sort of spiritual energy that was retained in life is set free; using Dr.Ross' simile, like a worm which has undergone a transformation and become a butterfly that all of a sudden has wings to fly. This ethereal entity knows all, loves all and lives on eternally.

I am not courageous enough to declare myself an atheist, I feel more comfortable with the term agnostic, but I am not certainly religious in the classical sense of the word, so I approached this book with caution and even a certain degree of skepticism.
Nevertheless, if you manage to suspend judgment and put your little ego aside along with all the fears and flimsy arguments that you repeat to yourself like a mantra to explain the inexplicable, you might find Dr. Kübler-Ross’ experiences worthy of reading, and who knows, even as an alternative possibility to consider.

Regardless of your intellectual reaction to Ross’ theories, I think this woman’s biggest feat is the kind of love she professed, the selfless involvement with the moribund patients that she treated for more than twenty-five years and the all-abiding humanity that exudes from her words.
Even if I might not be ready to fully believe that there is life after death, I can apply many of Dr. Kübler-Ross’ reflections to make the most of my earthly life by loving it, loving the people who share it with me and by making the most of my short time here with a positive attitude, regardless of the challenges ahead.
So Kudos, and thank you, Mrs. Kübler-Ross.

This is a dated book with good information. You can tell that this book has had a great impact on modern hospitals and staff. You get to read interviews with people facing death and to hear how they face it and in what ways. i think that is what I enjoyed most about it was hearing to the voice of the dying and what they need. They need to be listened to and they don't want to be forgotten.

“In the post–World War II era, as with every other aspect of social life, optimism and defiance pervaded America’s orientation to illness. Having endured the Great Depression, two world wars, and the Korean War, invincibility and perseverance were parts of the can-do American persona. A hopeful attitude in the face of adversity seemed intrinsically virtuous, part of the American way.

And there were good reasons to be optimistic. Startling breakthroughs in physics, chemistry, engineering, and—to most ­people most important—medicine were occurring almost daily. Cures for hitherto lethal conditions such as pneumonia, sepsis, kidney failure, and severe trauma had become commonplace. Disease was increasingly seen as a problem to be solved. The sense was that medical science might soon be able to arrest aging and (subconsciously at least) possibly conquer death itself.
In this culture, the best doctors were the ones who could always find another treatment to forestall death. In the 1950s and 1960s doctors rarely admitted when treatments weren’t working and commonly failed to tell patients when further treatments would do more harm than good. Physician culture epitomized the never-say-die stance, but doctors were not the only ones to maintain this pretense: sick people and their families all too readily colluded to avoid talking about dying.
It was common at the time for doctors to woefully undertreat seriously ill patients’ pain to the (often needlessly) bitter end. This was only partly due to the fact that doctors were poorly trained in the management of pain and other symptoms. It was also due to the conspiratorial, sunny pretense that doctors, patients, and their families maintained. Admitting that a person’s pain was getting worse might mean admitting that his or her disease was getting worse.
The medical culture of the era was highly authoritarian. A patient’s values, preferences, and priorities carried little weight. Doctors informed patients of the decisions they had made and patients accepted those decisions. In addition to the death-­defying prowess and prestige that distinguished the most successful doctors, peer pressure contributed to widespread neglect of people’s pain. While during the last hours of life most doctors would give enough morphine to keep patients from dying in agony, fears of raising eyebrows among colleagues kept many from giving their dying patients enough medication to be as comfortable as possible for the months they had left to live.
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.
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.
On Death and Dying sparked changes to prevailing assumptions and expectations that transformed clinical practice within very few years. In reasserting people’s personal sovereignty over illness and dying, Kübler-Ross’s book brought about a radical restructuring of patients’ relationships with their doctors and other clinicians. Suddenly, how people died mattered. No longer were dying patients relegated to hospital rooms at the far end of the hall. On Death and Dying is rightly credited with giving rise to the hospice movement—and, by extension, the new specialty of hospice and palliative medicine—but the “changes it set in place have pervaded nearly every specialty of medicine and nursing practice. For instance, by the late 1990s pain would become a “fifth vital sign” to be assessed in hospitals every time a patient’s temperature, pulse, blood pressure, and respirations were measured.
On Death and Dying also had profound impact on human research. No longer could experiences of “the dying” be objectified, nor could the study of dying be relegated to component histological, biochemical, physiological, or psychological pathologies. Instead, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s groundbreaking work opened up entirely new fields of inquiry into the care and subjective experiences of seriously ill people. The resulting interest in and validity of both quantitative and qualitative research on dying and end-of-life care accelerated advances within psychology and psychiatry, geriatrics, palliative medicine, clinical ethics, and anthropology.
Although she was steeped in the psychiatric theory of her day and proud of it, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was not bound by Freudian or Jungian formulations to her patients’ experiences. Instead she let “the voices and perspectives of the people she interviewed predominate. Her interviews allowed people to explain in their own words how they struggled to live with and make sense of an incurable condition. The psychodynamics that most interested Kübler-Ross were those between the person who was now incurably ill and the person who until now had been well.
In On Death and Dying Kübler-Ross famously delineated the “stages” of denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance to meticulously describe the emotional states seriously ill people commonly experienced and the adaptive mechanisms they used to make sense of and live with incurable conditions.
Popularized as Kübler-Ross’s “stages of dying,” they have been criticized for suggesting a formulaic progression of phases through the dying process. Anyone reading the book will recognize this characterization as a simplistic and inaccurate representation of what she described. In On Death and Dying, Kübler-Ross made it clear that these emotional states and adaptive mechanisms occur in a variety of “patterns. She relates interviews and stories of individuals who experienced a natural—though never easy—progression from initial denial and isolation through anger, bargaining, and depression and achieved a sense of acceptance of their situations, or at least acquiescence to it. She also relates the experiences of others in whom movement from one to another stage stalled in denial or anger. As the accounts of people we meet within On Death and Dying powerfully illustrate, it is common—and normal—for ill people to wrestle in ongoing ways with the discomforts, disabilities, fatigue, and physical dependence of illness and the impact of death’s approach. We learn that some people move through denial or anger only to have these emotional states later recur as illness advances. Emotional life is complex, and the interviews in On Death and Dying reveal that sometimes seemingly incompatible states, such as denial and acceptance, can coexist.
As important as its impacts on health care and research have been, the cultural influence of On Death and Dying extends to the fundamental ways “in which Americans have come to understand illness and dying.
It is worth noting how Kübler-Ross published the findings within On Death and Dying. Although the research certainly warranted the attention of a medical audience, she chose to write for the general public. She may well have understood that “the medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan, another visionary, asserted in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
I do not know how fully Kübler-Ross intended On Death and Dying to spark a cultural movement to improve end-of-life care and restore illness and dying to the proper dominion of people’s personal lives. But that is what it did. Indeed, Life magazine at the time referred to the book as “A profound lesson for the living.” Exactly.
Timeless themes within the uniquely human experience of ­illness—knowing that one’s life will one day end—make On Death and Dying relevant to readers today. As a physician, I am struck by how far we have come, and yet how far we still have to go to achieve truly person-centered care. I am reminded “to listen and approach patients who are seriously ill in a spirit of fellowship and service, for they are on a journey that none of us would choose but all of us must eventually travel.
In rereading On Death and Dying as a professional, I once again felt its impact on a personal level—as an individual who is also a son, brother, husband, father, and grandfather.
The people we are introduced to in On Death and Dying remind us of our own mortality, but they also show us that how people die is not predetermined and can be made better or worse by the choices they make and the quality of care they receive. We see some of the myriad ways the manner in which people are cared for and die affects those who love them. After all these years, On Death and Dying remains a call to action to listen to the people who need our help and respond with all the knowledge and skill we can bring to bear—always with humility, fellowship, and compassion.
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.
Things would never be the same.”
And we are all better for it.

This book is something that I feel just about everyone should read eventually. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross is an incredible psychologist who can help you get through the loss of a loved one. Myself, when my mom passed about 10 years ago, I had no idea how seriously her death had affected me, but my surviving family members could see it plain as day. It is a very delicate topic, no one wants to make light of losing someone and appear cold, and few want to show their pain because they don't want to seem weak. I can honestly say now, after 10 years of grieving and loss, life has become tolerable again, and it wouldn't have been if I hadn't read this book. I can even go one better and say that when I was a teen, a close friend died by suicide. This affected me greatly and I went through a lot of untreated pain, but my friend's mom went through even more and couldn't cope with it, wasn't able to get the help she needed in time, and she took her own life that Christmas. Remember this author, remember this title, and remember my friend and his mom.

Wartość tej książki polega na tym, że mówi o sprawach fundamentalnych z wielką wrażliwością i odwagą, że broni praw ludzi, którzy często nie mają siły i/lub umiejętności, by bronić się sami. Głównymi bohaterami tej rozprawy są ludzie nieuleczalnie chorzy, umierający. Rzecz niezwykła dla lat 60-tych w USA, gdy zaczęła swą pracę psychiatra, dr Ross - czasów, gdy o śmierci mówiło się niewiele i przyciszonym głosem, gdzie ciężko chorych się izolowało, bo "nic już nie można dla nich zrobić" lub wręcz przeciwnie, "męczyło się" ich zabiegami medycznymi, by o krótką chwilę przedłużyć im życie wypełnione cierpieniem.

W tej książce głos oddany jest pacjentom, którzy czasem po raz pierwszy mają okazję powiedzieć o swoich uczuciach, potrzebach, marzeniach i problemach. Mogą głośno wyrazić chęć wpływu na decyzje podejmowane w ich temacie. Poprzez rozmowę, czas, okazanie zainteresowania i ciepła, mają szansę poczuć się lepiej zrozumiani, mniej samotni, komuś potrzebni.

Tutaj nie ma jakichś wielkich odkryć, a mimo to główne przesłanie książki o prawie do godności wybrzmiewa bardzo mocno. Potrzeba mówienia o tym wydaje się wciąż aktualna. Mimo, że minęły dziesięciolecia, prawa pacjenta nie zawsze są respektowane we współczesnych szpitalach i domach opieki na całym świecie. Położenie nacisku wyłącznie na medyczne i techniczne aspekty choroby, lekceważenie emocji i potrzeby bliskości w doświadczeniu chorowania i umierania, ostatecznie dehumanizuje nas i nasze rodziny.

I re-read this book from time to time simply because it helps me put 'the circle of life' into perspective, and having recently had to put Honey, our 11.5 year old dog to sleep, I pulled this out again and read the parts that deal with the process and necessity and importance of allowing ourselves to grieve.

One of the most important psychological studies of the late twentieth century, On Death and Dying grew out of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's famous interdisciplinary seminar on death, life, and transition. In this remarkable book, Dr. Kübler-Ross first explored the now-famous five stages of death: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Through sample interviews and conversations, she gives the reader a better understanding of how imminent death affects the patient, the professionals who serve that patient, and the patient's family, bringing hope to all who are involved.

On Death and Dying isn't the kind of book I normally read - much less review - but it's such an important, powerful work that I feel it needs to be shared in hopes that others will benefit from the insights and wisdom found within.

This is a well written, compassionate but honest collection of interviews with dying patients and their families, the purpose of this study/book being to help both deal with the emotions and the many phases of death they will face. Denial. Anger. Depression.... It was a difficult read sometimes because I couldn't help but become attached to the patients and ache for what they were going through.

And as hard as it might be to believe, this book is also an excellent help when going through a relationship breakup, whether by choice or not. As my dear friend, Beverly, always told me, "You have to go through it to get through it. I miss you, Brat!

I highly recommend this book to anyone with elderly or ailing friends or family members, or to anyone who works in healthcare. It's written with respect and integrity, giving hope to the living and honoring the dying by helping assure them of a peaceful, dignified passing.

what an insightful read. as someone who aspires to enter the medical field, in some ways, i felt inclined to read his because i felt it was necessary to expand my perspective on death and dying and how, as a physician in the future, i can help navigate such conversations with patients. going through this book definitely did that. so many points that struck a chord of awe in me and made me go "THAT'S the kind of doctor i want to be." it is also fascinating to see that even though this book was written in the 60s, some of the problems seen in hospitals listed in the book are still relevant today. really makes u wonder how much medicine has actually advanced in terms of taking care of and advocating for terminally ill patients.

highly recommend to anyone in proximity to healthcare or is just grappling with the topic of death!

On death and dying
By me
“On death and dying” By Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Ross goes on the subject of death, explaining what death truely means. She goes on about the the lifestyle of the patient, and how the paitent and realtives react to death. Throughout the book the book has a outline and it was to follow the 5 steps of grief,each with a patient story on how they concured each step. Denial, baraging, anger, depression, and Acceptance are all steps needed to concure death the real pain of death.
Ross first starts this book, by talking about what are the causes of death, and why people fear death so much. “The more we are making advancements in science the more we fear and deny the reality of death”. This quote is was quite interesting because science is progressing every sec and if they say more science progesses the more we fear the reality of death. Over the course of the book she kept going on about the 5 stages of grief. Lastly she talked from the patients perpective, on what they do and what happened and finally ends it with the reactions on how the realtives face this ongoing problem that everyone suffers.
What I thought that was quite interesting was that the way she expressed death in her manner. She talked about death as if she had experenced death from a personial view. A good example was; “A husband and a wife may have been fighting for years, But when the parnter dies, the survivor will pull his hair, whine and cry louder and beat his chrest in regreat, fear and angunish, and will hench his own fear more then before.” This was very interesting and gave me a lot to think about when reading. After reading this book i thought it gave me a new perspective how to look at death...

Read this during college. I don't remember very much of it except that I admired her for being willing to study and write about a subject very few people I knew would even talk about.

Much as during the rest of our life, at the time of dying and death itself what we seem to need most is love and acceptance. What that looks like is different for all of us and it takes a special kind of person to recognize what that need is for the individual and to offer them that comfort.