The Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross changed western cultural resistance to dealing with death, and the teaching of how to accept it. But her own death, at the age of 78, came after years of debilitation during which she expressed bitterness that her readiness to die was going unfulfilled.
Partially paralysed after a series of strokes nine years ago, she declared in a 2002 interview: "I told God last night that he's a damned procrastinator." Death eventually came at a home for the elderly in the resort of Scottsdale, Arizona.
Kubler-Ross's best known contribution to the study, thanatology, that she had helped to create, was the five stages of dying people go through. She described them - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance - in her bestseller On Death And Dying (1969), written in two months. Not everyone experiences all five, she cautioned, but at least two are always present.
The definition, reached after scores of interviews with people facing imminent death, helped the medical profession to deal with a factor it had long refused to acknowledge, especially in the US. Kubler-Ross had been shocked by the indifference to, or denial of the dying she found at a Chicago hospital where she moved with her American husband, Dr Emanuel Ross, in 1965.
She wrote more than 20 books, and On Grief And Grieving is due out in 2005. But the respect Kubler-Ross had gained began to crumble as her views became increasingly eccentric. A firm believer in a god and the life hereafter, she became fascinated with near-death experiences and an advocate for people's stories of seeing a shining light and familiar faces, before being brought back from the brink. Many doctors believe these are hallucinations connected to the physical process of death and not afterlife previews.
Then, in 1976, she fell under the spell of a psychic channeller in California who was investigated on suspicion of unlawful sexual activities. Some began to wonder about her mental health and it also cost her her marriage in 1979. She renounced the psychic, but had damaged her scientific reputation.
Kubler-Ross nearly died as an infant. She was born in Zurich, the third of triplets and weighing only two pounds. She also suffered under a cruel father who once took her pet rabbit to a butcher and then forced Elisabeth to join the family as it ate her pet for dinner. Her father opposed her wish to be a doctor and demanded she become a secretary in his business.
Instead she worked in a Zurich laboratory and then volunteered as a relief worker. She visited a Nazi concentration camp in Poland after the end of the war and saw, on the blighted barrack walls, hundreds of images of butterflies, a symbol of rebirth amid mass deaths. The experience left a profound impression.
Finally she entered Zurich University, took a medical degree in 1957 - and met her husband. In 1958 they moved to New York, where she completed psychiatric training, and in 1961 became a US citizen. She then taught at the University of Colorado's medical school, and began her work with the dying.
One triumph was to introduce to her class a girl of 16 who was dying of leukaemia. The students asked medical questions, but Kubler-Ross encouraged the girl to express her feelings, and she erupted in an emotive tirade that left the class in tears.
In Chicago Kubler-Ross had trouble with doctors who objected when she asked to talk to their dying patients, and would sometimes even claim that none of their patients was facing the end. But she persevered and by 1967 was holding packed weekly seminars where the terminally ill talked frankly. Two years later Life magazine carried an article about these meetings and Kubler-Ross was famous. She seized the opportunity and wrote her book. It is still in print.
She lived in Virginia and southern California and in both established hospice-style retreats. Although she did not found the hospice movement, its adherents credit her with encouraging it. Today the US has over 1,200 such institutions.
She moved to Scottsdale to be near her son Kenneth, a photographer. Kubler-Ross is also survived by a daughter.
· Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, thanatologist, born July 8 1926; died August 24 2004
