Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a psychiatrist with a particular interest in end-of-life care. Especially interested in the care of dying patients, she researched their attitudes to death. Her groundbreak- ing work, On Death and Dying, identified the “five stages” that dying people go through as they approach death and this model has been enormously influential over the past forty years.

The book is a classic because it introduced scientific observation of death and dying and near death experiences in popular form to the United States 40 years ago.