Saunders · 1967
Cicely Saunders and St Christopher's
On the twenty-fourth of July 1967, in the newly built fifty-four-bed hospice complex at 51–59 Lawrie Park Road in Sydenham, south London, Dame Cicely Mary Saunders, forty-nine years old, the Barnet-born nurse (Nightingale School of Nursing 1940–44, displaced from nursing by a back-injury in 1944), almoner-medical-social-worker (London School of Economics 1945–47), and physician (St Thomas's Hospital Medical School 1951–57), opened St Christopher's Hospice as the first modern academic-clinical hospice in the world: an in-patient hospital dedicated to the care of the dying, on the explicit principles of comprehensive symptom-control (pain, breathlessness, nausea, anxiety), psychological-and-spiritual-care of the patient and family, and multidisciplinary clinical-research-and-teaching. The founding-bequest of the hospice was the five-hundred-pound legacy of the Polish-Jewish-refugee patient David Tasma (a Warsaw-Jewish émigré whom Saunders had nursed at the Archway Hospital in 1948 through his terminal cancer at the age of forty, and who had left her his life-savings *to be a window in your home*). Saunders had spent the next nineteen years (1948–67) raising the rest of the funding, training as a doctor, developing the symptom-control pharmacology (the Brompton cocktail-protocol for cancer-pain control), and acquiring the Lawrie-Park-Road site. The hospice opened with seven patients. By 2025, the modern hospice movement that Saunders founded comprised about thirty thousand hospice institutions in a hundred and twenty countries.
It is twenty past nine on the morning of Monday the twenty-fourth of July 1967, in the front entrance hall of the newly built four-storey hospice building at 51–59 Lawrie Park Road in Sydenham, south London, in summer light through the south-facing entrance doors. She is forty-eight years old (her forty-ninth birthday is one month away). She is Cicely Mary Strode Saunders, born at Linden Lodge in Barnet, Hertfordshire, on the twenty-second of June 1918, daughter of the estate-agent Gordon Saunders and Chrissie Knight, schooled at Roedean and St Anne's College Oxford (1938–40, came down without taking a degree to train as a wartime nurse), in her tenth year of medical practice since the 1957 medical-qualification at St Thomas's Hospital.
In the entrance hall with her are the staff team of seven (a Matron, a Senior Sister, two nurses, two orderlies, and the medical director Dr Mary Baines). The Hospice has been built over the previous two years at a total construction-cost of about £300,000 (about £6 million in 2025 money), funded principally by the King's Fund, the Wolfson Foundation, the Nuffield Foundation, and about a thousand small-private donations from the Sydenham-and-Bromley parishes of south London.
She thinks, by her personal letter to David Tasma's Warsaw cousins (preserved in the Saunders papers at King's College London): David's five hundred pounds, given me on the twenty-fifth of February 1948 at the Archway Hospital, is the foundational endowment of this hospice. The five hundred has, in nineteen years of fundraising-and-development, become three hundred thousand pounds. The three hundred thousand has, on the twenty-fourth of July 1967, become an open hospice with the first seven patients admitting this afternoon.
She thinks: the hospice principle is the comprehensive symptom-control (pain, breathlessness, nausea, anxiety) combined with the psychological-and-spiritual-care of the patient and family. The principle is the direct contradiction of the mid-twentieth-century British medical convention that the dying patient is the failure-of-medical-care and is, on the Whitechapel-and-other-hospital ward-practice, to be moved to a side-room at the end of the corridor and visited by the nurses only when necessary.
She thinks: David Tasma asked me, in his 1948 hospital-bed conversations, what I would do with the five hundred pounds. I told him I would build a home where dying people would not be left alone. He said I want to be a window in your home. The stained-glass window in the Chapel of the Hospice has been built into the east wall this past month by the Whitefriars Studio stained-glass works on the explicit Tasma-window commission.
St Christopher's Hospice opened at ten in the morning of the twenty-fourth of July 1967 with the admission of seven in-patients from the Bromley-Sydenham hospital-referral list. The hospice grew to fifty-four beds by 1970, expanded to seventy-three by 1985, and is, in 2025, the foundational research-and-teaching hospice of the international hospice movement. The Saunders pharmacology of comprehensive symptom-control (the Brompton cocktail-protocol of oral morphine on a regular-four-hour clock-schedule, the adjuvant anti-emetic and anti-anxiety co-administration) became the international standard of palliative-care from the 1970s onward.
Dame Cicely Saunders was awarded the OBE in 1967, the DBE in 1980, the Order of Merit in 1989 (one of the twenty-four living holders of the OM, the highest British civilian honour), and the Templeton Prize in 1981. She continued as the Medical Director of St Christopher's until 1985 and then as Chairman of the Trustees until her death. She died at St Christopher's Hospice (in the bed she had set aside for her own use) on the fourteenth of July 2005, eighty-seven years old. She is buried at the Hospice's small private garden-of-remembrance, beside the 1967 Tasma stained-glass window. The modern hospice movement that Saunders founded comprised, in the 2025 international audit, about thirty thousand hospice institutions in a hundred and twenty countries, with about eight million end-of-life-care admissions a year. By every careful judgment of twentieth-century medical-history (David Clark, Andrea Lampraki), the Cicely Saunders hospice movement is the foundational palliative-care innovation of the twentieth-century medical-clinical practice.