Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance: the five stages of grief are nowadays part of popular knowledge, so much so that they have been spoofed several times in The Simpsons. It is less known that it was a Swiss-American psychiatrist who defined “DABDA.” Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was born a century ago in Zurich (July 8, 1926) where she would be among the few female medical students before moving to the United States. In 1967, she began interviewing dying patients at the University of Chicago’s Billings Hospital on which she based her groundbreaking bestseller On Death and Dying (1969). Together with Prof. Anna Magdalena Elsner, we look at Kübler-Ross’s legacy beyond the five stages of grief.

Anna Magdalena Elsner is Associate Professor of French Studies and Medical Humanities at the University of St.Gallen. Her work on death, dying, and mourning in twentieth-century and contemporary French literature, philosophy and film aims to foster a culture of critical as well as transdisciplinary thinking about medicine, care and the end of life. She is the principal investigator of Assisted Lab, an ERC project that engages with the aesthetics, laws, and ethics of assisted dying. Anna holds a BA in philosophy and modern languages from Oxford University and obtained her PhD in 2011 from the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Mourning and Creativity in Proust (Palgrave, 2017) and the co-editor of The Proustian Mind (Routledge, 2022) and Literature and Medicine (Cambridge UP, 2024).