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Dame Cicely Mary Strode Saunders, OM, DBE (June 22, 1918 – July 14, 2005) was a prominent British nurse, physician and writer, involved with many international universities. She was most famous for her role in the birth of the hospice movement, emphasizing the importance of palliative care in modern medicine. She was an Anglican by religious conviction.
Life and work
Saunders was educated at Roedean, St Anne's College, Oxford, St Thomas' Hospital Medical School, and at the Nightingale School of Nursing, qualifying as a nurse in 1944, and then a medical social worker in 1947.
She founded St. Christopher's Hospice, the world's first purpose-built hospice, in 1967. The hospice was founded on the principles of combining expert pain and symptom relief with holistic care to meet the physical, social, psychological and spiritual needs of its patients and those of their family and friends.
In 1965 Saunders was made an Officer of the British Empire. In 1979 she was further elevated by knighthood to DBE and became known as Dame Cecily Saunders. In 1981 Dame Cicely was awarded the Templeton Prize, the world's richest annual prize awarded to an individual.
In 1989 Dame Cicely was appointed to the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II. In 2001 she received the world's largest humanitarian award - the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, worth £700,000 - on behalf of St Christopher's. On April 25, 2005, another (*) portrait of her was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery.
She was a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing and a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.
She died of cancer at the age of 87 in 2005, at the hospice she herself had founded.
Titles and honours
Shorthand titles
- Miss Cicely Saunders (June 22, 1918 – January 1, 1965)
- Miss Cicely Saunders, OBE (January 1, 1965 – December 31, 1979)
- Dame Cicely Saunders, DBE (December 31, 1979 – November 30, 1989)
- Dame Cicely Saunders, OM, DBE (November 30, 1989 – July 14, 2005)
Honours
- Dame Commander of the British Empire (elevated from Officer)
- Member of the Order of Merit
External links
- BBC obituary
- Guardian obituary
- A personal therapeutic journey, Cicely Saunders British Medical Journal 1996
- Cicely Saunders Foundation
- BBC Woman's Hour interview and history, broadcast 17th August 2001
- "Cicely Saunders, RIP"
British nurses | Palliative medicine | British doctors | Former students of St Anne's College, Oxford | Members of the Order of Merit | Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire | British Anglicans | 1918 births | 2005 deaths
"Cicely Saunders"