Image credit: St Christopher’s Hospice
This Celebration Day, we’re remembering the founder of the world’s first modern hospice – pioneering physician Dame Cicely Saunders.
The last Monday in May marks Celebration Day – a day of remembrance and reflection, during which we are invited to ‘mark the memory’ of people who have made us who we are today. We wanted to take this opportunity to look back on the life of Dame Cicely Saunders – a nurse, medical social worker and physician who is recognised as the founder of the world’s first modern hospice.
Here are four things to know about her incredible life and legacy.
1. She chose an unusual career path
Dame Cicely Saunders was born in 1918, the eldest of three children. World War Two broke out while she was attending university at St. Anne’s College Oxford, prompting her to leave her Politics, Philosophy and Economics course to study nursing, which she felt would be more useful. She qualified as a nurse in 1944, returning to Oxford to complete her degree after the war. Her varied education led her into a career as a ‘Lady Almoner’ – the name, at that time, for a medical social worker.
Dame Cicely Saunders as a nurse. Credit: St Christopher’s Hospice
2. She recognised the important of holistic care
When Cicely began her career, she cared for patients with terminal illnesses at Archway Hospital and at St Luke’s Hospital, both in London. At Archway, she developed a deep bond with a dying patient named David Tasma, an encounter which proved influential in Cicely’s journey. According to Professor David Clark, an academic and biographer of Cicely’s life, David had ‘left Poland just before the war. He’d abandoned his family as he saw it. And he didn’t know what had happened to them… he couldn’t go back. He’d given up his Jewish faith, so he had all of this kind of existential pain.’
Noticing David’s problems extended beyond his incurable cancer to psychological and spiritual turmoil, Cicely identified that a holistic approach was necessary to ease David’s pain. She visited him regularly, and they talked at length about compassion, faith, love and the meaning of a completed life. Together they conceptualised what a better environment for him to die in might look like – far from the noisy, busy hospital ward he was on. When David died, he left Cicely a gift of £500 with which to found such a place, with the words, “I will be a window in your home.”
Cicely with a patient. Credit: St Christopher’s Hospice and Derek Bayes
3. She refused to accept that ‘nothing more could be done’
As well as careful consideration of each patient’s wider needs, Cicely was resolute in her belief that relieving physical pain was key to alleviating mental suffering. This was an unusual approach; at that time, doctors typically focused solely on curing illnesses and patients were given inadequate pain relief. Having been told that her unorthodox ideas would be rejected unless she became a doctor, she trained at St Thomas’s Medical School and graduated in 1957.
Cicely was dedicated to furthering research into palliative care, a kind of care which focuses on reducing pain when a patient’s illness cannot be cured. As a newly qualified doctor, she was awarded a scholarship to research pain management, and used her medical skills to improve care at St Joseph’s Hospice and among those dying in poverty in Bayswater. Patients under Cicely’s care had regular access to pain medication and continuous treatment which eased their discomfort.
4. Her legacy lives on
In 1967, Cicely founded St Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham, London. The culmination of Cicely’s years of hard work and visionary insight, St Christopher’s became widely recognised as the first modern hospice because it was the first to combine clinical research and teaching with compassionate medical care and holistic pain management.
Cicely’s model for hospices has been imitated all over the world, and her ideas continue to influence the delivery of palliative care today.
“You matter because you are you. You matter to the last moment of your life, and we will do all we can, not only to help you die peacefully but also to live until you die.” – Cicely Saunders
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Sources and further reading:
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/cicelysaunders/about-us/cicely-saunders
https://cicelysaundersinternational.org/dame-cicely-saunders/st-christophers-hospice/
https://ehospice.com/uk_posts/cicely-and-david-a-play-about-the-origins-of-hospice-by-david-clark/
https://www.stchristophers.org.uk/about/damecicelysaunders/
https://www.bmj.com/content/suppl/2005/07/18/331.7509.DC1
