Learning the Craft and Crafting the Vision (1957 – 1967)
Learning the Craft and Crafting the Vision (1957 – 1967)
Cicely Saunders was the first modern doctor to devote her entire professional career to caring for those at the end of life. Her approach was forged in clinical practise, research, and teaching at St Joseph’s Hospice. It was significantly influenced by the writings of authors such as C.S. Lewis, Viktor Frankl, and Teilhard de Chardin. Emerging ideas about religious community, found in the work of theologians such as Olive Wyon, were also significant. She set out to re-invent older traditions of terminal care into a new, modern guise, drawing on medical innovations in pain and symptom control, and emerging ideas of personhood, suffering, and identity. Her aims were given added authenticity through a series of personal bereavements in the early 1960s. This chapter also describes the detailed process by which St Christopher’s Hospice became a reality and opened its doors in July 1967, when Cicely Saunders was forty-nine years old.
Keywords: hospice, terminal care, pain, symptoms, ‘total pain’, St Christopher’s
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