Elisabeth Kübler-Ross pioneered the concept of providing psychological counseling to the dying. In her first book, On Death and Dying (1969), she described five stages she believed were experienced by those nearing death—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Dr. Carolyn Robinowitz was the founding director of the American Psychiatric Office of Education in 1976 and the first woman psychiatrist elected to the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in 1979.
In 1973, Dr. Shirley Marks was the first Spelman College alumna, and only the second African American woman in twenty-three years to graduate from Harvard Medical School.
In 2002, after two decades in academic medicine, Rebekah Wang-Cheng, M.D., decided to leave the Medical College of Wisconsin and open a solo practice in California.
Dr. Cohen was one of twelve women in Harvard Medical School’s first coeducational graduating class in 1949.
Dr. Buckingham has received the Presidential Scholar Award from the Black American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Black National Medical Association, Psychiatry Division, Chester Pierce Resident’s Award.
Dr. Martha Medrano is a pioneer in medical education who wants works to make medical students more culturally competent.
Dr. Mary H. Roessel was the first person in her Diné (Navajo) community to attend medical school and become a doctor (1987) and the first woman Diné (Navajo) psychiatrist to provide Indian Health Service clinical care in New Mexico.
Through her lectures, workshops, syndicated radio programs and other communications media, Linda Austin, M.D., expands her clinical care to educate people across the country on substance abuse and mental health issues.
In 1948, Dr. Margaret Lawrence was the first African American to complete a residency at the New York Psychiatric Institute and the first African American trainee to be certified in psychoanalysis at Columbia University’s Columbia Psycoanalytic Center. In 1953, she was the first practicing child psychiatrist in Rockland County, New York and co-founder of the Rockland County Center for Mental Health in New York.