Hospice Movement Founder Dies

SOMETIMES THE important news is not too important. Sometimes it ought to take a back seat to the really important stuff, the stuff of life and death that we ignore in favor of the ephemeral and the titillating.

On July 14, Dame Cicely Saunders died aged 87. She was the “Visionary founder of the modern hospice movement who set the highest standards in care for the dying.”

She found her metier when caring for

a dying patient, David Tasma, a refugee from the Warsaw ghetto, whom she met on her first rounds as an almoner at St Thomas’s. He was a friendless waiter with no family, and there was no consolation for him except in the love which she discovered to be within her reach. It was then that she saw how the pain of cancer could be tamed by modern drugs and that unavoidable distress could be made tolerable by a form of care that ranked the physical and spiritual needs of the patient together.

Dame Cicely was a Briton of the old school, “a charismatic grande dame with strong values and a great talent for leadership” who became an Evangelical Christian in her young adulthood in the years immediately after World War II.

Go ahead. Read the whole thing. It is the story of a remarkable life.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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