Dame Cicely Saunders Om DBE: Founder of the Hospice System

Sixty years ago, when I was a young house-surgeon at the old Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, we were not at all expert at dealing with our dying patients. Of course, we had every pity and sympathy with them and their families, but we were often constrained by the family members themselves from talking frankly to the patient, and our use of pain-relieving drugs: morphine, heroin and the Brompton mixture, was not very scientific. We were warned of the danger of the patient becoming rapidly tolerant to increasing doses of narcotic drugs. Although devoted general practitioners and district nurses would make frequent home visits to their terminal patients, designated hospices hardly existed and much of the care fell onto the shoulders of the family. Often, a dying patient, carefully hidden behind the screens, would be found at the far end of the surgical or medical ward. The revolution in palliative care that we see today owes itself to one remarkable person - Cicely Mary Saunders.