Cicely Saunders

Dame Cicely Mary Strode Saunders was an English nurse, social worker, physician, and writer who founded the modern hospice movement and reshaped global understanding of palliative care for the dying. Her concept of "total pain," encompassing physical, emotional, social, and spiritual suffering, became a foundation of end-of-life medicine worldwide.

Saunders was born on June 22, 1918, in Barnet, Hertfordshire, the eldest child of estate agent Gordon Saunders and Chrissie Knight. She studied politics, philosophy, and economics at St Anne's College, Oxford, before leaving in 1940 to train as a nurse at the Nightingale School of Nursing at St Thomas's Hospital. A back injury cut short her nursing work, and she retrained as a medical almoner.

While working at St Luke's Hospital and St Joseph's Hospice in London during the 1950s she observed the inadequate management of pain in dying patients. Encouraged to pursue medicine to gain authority for reform, she qualified as a physician in 1957 and began researching the use of regular oral opioids to control chronic pain.

In 1967 she opened St Christopher's Hospice in Sydenham, south London, the first purpose-built modern hospice combining clinical care, teaching, and research. She lectured internationally, mentored generations of clinicians, and wrote extensively on care of the dying. She was appointed OBE in 1967, DBE in 1980, and a member of the Order of Merit in 1989. She died at St Christopher's on July 14, 2005, aged 87.

Her name Cicely derives from the medieval English form of Latin Cecilia, from caecus meaning "blind," the name of the patron saint of music. Cicely has been used in England since the Middle Ages.