Episode 60. Cicely Saunders and the Modern Hospice Movement

SYNOPSIS

The redoubtable visionary Dame Cicely Saunders (1918 - 2005) is recognized as the founder of the modern hospice movement, culminating in her opening St Christopher’s, London in 1967, which set about training a cohort of medical specialists from around the world in palliative care. Behind her innovations lay a transformative belief in the importance to terminally-ill patients of dying well: ‘you matter because you are you and you matter to the last moment of your life.’

The episode explores her life as the daughter of an upworldly mobile land agent father who educated her at the prestigious Roedean School after which she studied Modern Greats (PPE) at Oxford. Her education was interrupted by the Second World War which led her to defer further study by enrolling as a Nightingale Nurse at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, finding herself ‘fitting in’ for the first time in her life.

Her remarkable trajectory is explored, leading after the completion of her war degree to work as a medical social worker in the new Welfare State before deciding to qualify as a doctor at the instigation of her manager, the distinguished Australian surgeon, Norman Barrett. The episode then examines her relationships with three Polish emigres, firstly the dying David Tasma, who became part of the founding origin story of St Christopher’s, then Antoni Michniewicz and lastly the distinguished expressionist painter, Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, whom she married in 1980.

GUESTS

Professor David Clark OBE is Emeritus Professor of Medical Sociology at the University of Glasgow and has been one of the leading international sociological researchers in the field of palliative care. First meeting Cicely Saunders in 1995, David became instrumental in organizing the cataloguing and archiving of her papers at King’s College London. His biography of Cicely Saunders was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. Since then he has written a play called Cicely and David which dramatizes her key relationship in the development of the modern hospice movement - with David Tasma. Professor Clark was awarded the OBE in 2017 for services to end of life care research.

Simon’s interview with David Clark was recorded online on 5 February 2025.

Further information about David and Cicely can be found at:

https://davidgrahamclark.net/cicely-and-david-a-play/