Cicely Saunders was born in 1918. She began studying politics, philosophy, and economics at St. Anne's College, Oxford, in 1938. During the war, she decided to become a nurse and trained at the Nightingale School of Nursing based at St. Thomas's Hospital from 1940 to 1944. She suffered a back injury and took a year off to convalesce before returning to St. Anne's College. She received a bachelor of arts degree in 1945 and qualified as a medical social worker in 1947. It was in the course of her work as a social worker that she become particularly conscious of the poor care that dying patients received in hospital.
Saunders trained as a doctor at St. Thomas's Hospital Medical School and qualified at the age of 38. She then took a research job at St. Mary's Hospital and also began working at St. Joseph's Hospice in London. There she started to develop her approach to hospice care and published and lectured on the subject. She also started to fund raise to build St. Christopher's Hospice in south west London which opened in 1967. The hospice soon extended its activities to research and added a study centre.
Saunders is best known for introducing the idea of “total pain,” which included the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual dimensions of distress. She was made a Dame of the Order of the British Empire in 1980 and received the Order of Merit in 1989. In 2001, St. Christopher's Hospice received the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Price, the world's largest humanitarian award. St. Christopher's remains a centre of education and teaching in palliative care at the same time as providing direct clinical services to patients. She died from cancer in 2005 at St. Christopher's Hospice.
Saunders delivered the Beatty Lecture on October 28, 1997, titled, “Lessons in Living from the Dying”.
Download a PDF of Cicely Saunder's Beatty Lecture transcript
here.
Cicely Saunders recieves an honorary docctorate from McGill
as part of her time at McGill in 1997.
Transcript: McGill University Archives
Image: Cicely Saunders International (top) and McGill University Archives (bottom)
