THE gifted nurse made it her mission to transform end-of-life care.
As a Google Doodle celebrates her 100th birthday we take a look at the extraordinary life of Dame Cicely Saunders.
Times Newspapers Ltd Cicely Saunders was made a Dame for her decades of work towards palliative care
Who was Dame Cicely Saunders?
Dame Cicely Mary Saunders was born on June 22, 2018, in Barnet, Hertfordshire.
She began studying politics, philosophy and economics at St Anne's College, Oxford, in 1938.
But in 1940, she broke off her studies to train at the Nightingale School of Nursing, where she was based from 1940-44.
Saunders then returned to Oxford to finish her first degree.
The gifted student qualified as a social worker in 1947, and eventually trained as a doctor at St Thomas' Hospital Medical School in 1957.
The English Anglican nurse was also a social worker, physician and writer.
AFP - Getty Dame Cicelyl Saunders is known for her work on palliative care
What is the nurse famous for?
Saunders is most famous for her role in the hospice movement.
Her idea to start one originated when she fell in love with her patient, David Tasma, in 1948.
The Polish-Jewish refugee had escaped from the Warsaw ghetto but was now dying of cancer.
Her bequeathed her £500 (now worth more than £13,0000) to be a "window in your home".
The donation planted the seed of the hospice that would become St Christopher's, and is remembered with a plain sheet of glass at the hospice's entrance.
St Christopher's Hospice - the world's first purpose-built hospice - was established in 1967.
Saunders worked as its medical director and from 1985 as its chair, before she became its president in 2000.
She also co-founded Cicely Saunders International, a charity whose mission was to promote research to improve the care and treatment of all patients with progressive illness.
Its aim was also to make high-quality palliative care available to everyone who needs it, no matter where they are.
Saunders was also instrumental in the history of UK medical ethics.
She was made a Dame in 1979, and a member of the order of merit (OM) in 1989.
A Google Doodle is celebrating Dame Cicely Saunders' 100th birthday
Did Saunders marry and when did she die?
While working at St Josteph's Hospice in the 1950s she met a second Pole, Antoni Michniewicz, a patient whom she fell in love with.
She had already decided to set up her own hospice, serving cancer patients, and said that Michniewicz's death in 1963 had shown her that "as the body becomes weaker, so the spirit becomes stronger".
Three years later she became friends with Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, a Polish émigré and professor with a degree in fine art.
They met and became friends, and she became a patron of his art.
He was still supporting his estranged wife in Poland, and the pair finally married in 1980, five years after the death of his ife.
She was 61 and he was 79. He spent his last days at St Christopher's Hospice, where he died in 1995.
Saunders died of cancer at the age of 87 in 2005 at the hospice she had founded.
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What is a Google Doodle?
In 1998, the search engine founders Larry and Sergey drew a stick figure behind the second 'o' of Google as a message to that they were out of office at the Burning Man festival and with that, Google Doodles were born.
The company decided that they should decorate the logo to mark cultural moments and it soon became clear that users really enjoyed the change to the Google homepage.
Google Google celebrated the Autumn Equinox with a themed doodle
In that same year, a turkey was added to Thanksgiving and two pumpkins appeared as the 'o's for Halloween the following year.
Now, there is a full team of doodlers, illustrators, graphic designers, animators and classically trained artists who help create what you see on those days.
Among the Doodles published in past months were designs commemorating German scientist Robert Koch, Jan Ingenhousz (who discovered photosynthesis) and the 50th anniversary of kids coding languages being introduced.
And the search giant celebrated the 2017 Autumn Equinox , which marked the official ending of summer and the coming of autumn.
The history of Google Doodles, what they are and where they came from
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Dame Cicely Saunders believed that everyone should live with “a sense of fulfillment and a readiness to let go.”
The pioneer of the modern hospice movement, who was born 100 years ago today, performed many roles in her life, including nurse, doctor, author, and social worker.
It was while caring for a terminally ill patient that she recognised certain challenges other medical professionals of her time did not: that his diagnosis required a fundamentally different kind of healthcare.
Through this experience, Saunders envisioned an environment that focused care on a patient’s individual and specific needs.
As a result, she went on to found St. Christopher’s, the first modern hospice, in a suburb of London in 1967.
(Image: PA)
(Image: Google)
There, core values included vigilant pain-management as well as a holistic and individualised understanding of practical, medical, and psychological patient needs.
Not only did Saunders’ work inspire hundreds of other hospices worldwide, but her books and teachings also established a new branch of medicine known as palliative care, which addresses the importance of holistic care among patients with life-limiting illnesses.
(Image: PA)
She also went on to establish a global charity focusing on palliative care research and education, Cicely Saunders International, which still works to improve the lives of patients with progressive illness to this day.
Today’s Doodle, by London-based artist Briony May Smith, was inspired by Saunders' favourite anthology, 'All In the End is Harvest' (1984) which states, “Love and life is an eternal thing, like the growth and reaping of the harvest."
A pioneer of the modern hospice movement, Dame Cicely Saunders felt that all should live with “a sense of fulfillment and a readiness to let go.”
Born 100 years ago today, Saunders performed many roles in her life, including nurse, doctor, author, and social worker. It was while caring for a terminally ill patient that she recognized certain challenges other medical professionals of her time did not: that his diagnosis required a fundamentally different kind of healthcare.
Through this experience, Saunders envisioned an environment that focused care on a patient’s individual and specific needs. As a result, she went on to found St. Christopher’s, the first modern hospice, in a suburb of London in 1967. There, core values included vigilant pain-management as well as a holistic and individualized understanding of practical, medical, and psychological patient needs.
Not only did Saunders’ work inspire hundreds of other hospices worldwide, but her books and teachings also established a new branch of medicine known as palliative care, which addresses the importance of holistic care among patients with life-limiting illnesses. She also went on to establish a global charity focusing on palliative care research and education, Cicely Saunders International , which still works to improve the lives of patients with progressive illness to this day.
Today’s Doodle, created by London-based guest artist Briony May Smith , was inspired by Saunders' favorite anthology, All In the End is Harvest (1984) which states, “Love and life is an eternal thing, like the growth and reaping of the harvest."
Special thanks to Christopher Saunders, brother of Dame Cicely Saunders and Life President of Cicely Saunders International, for his partnership on this project. Below, Christopher shares his thoughts on his sister:
Cicely came a long way from being a six-foot tall, shy, very intelligent girl who felt like a bit of an outsider, to being one of the very remarkable people who have positively impacted end-of-life care around the world. Yet there is still much work to be done. The need for palliative care has never been greater and is increasing rapidly given that people are living longer as a result of improvements in tackling acute disease. While each illness brings specific physical symptoms such as pain and fatigue, there are also more invisible ones such as helplessness and loneliness, which can too often become part of the final phase of life. Cicely’s medical research charity, Cicely Saunders International, enters the centenary year of her birth energised with the spirit of Cicely to meet these continuing challenges, and make a positive difference just as she did throughout her life.
Early sketches of the Doodle below
Dame Cicely Saunders is being honoured by Google on the occasion of what would have been her 100th birthday, but who is she? (Picture: Getty)
Dying with dignity, and in relative comfort, is something we all hope to be entitled to when the time comes.
Dame Cicely Saunders is the brilliant woman responsible for the establishment of UK hospices which provide this service.
She thereby helped establish the role of palliative care which, before her time, was not available on the NHS.
Here’s what we know about this compassionate and courageous nurse, who is being honoured by Google with a Doodle on what would have been her 100th birthday.
Young Dame Cicely when she was an undergraduate, and then a medical social worker (Picture: Getty)
Dame Cicely Saunders was born on 22 June 1918 in Barnet, Hertfordshire.
She decided to be a nurse midway through the Second World War in 1940, while she was studying a PPE at Oxford. By 1947 she had qualified as a medical social worker.
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A year later she fell in love with her patient, David Tasma, a Polish-Jewish refugee who, having escaped from the Warsaw ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, worked as a waiter.
He was dying of cancer and bequeathed her £500 to be ‘a window in your home’. This donation helped form Dame Cicely’s idea to build and run St Christopher’s, the first hospice she established in 1967.
Around the end of the 1940s Dame Cicely had converted to Christianity, and began working part-time at St Luke’s Home for the Dying Poor in Bayswater.
Founder of the Uk Hospice movement, dame cicely saunders. Credit St Christopher’s Hospice
Her experiences there led her to study to become a physician and by 1957 she had an MBBS, beginning life as a practicing doctor.
While working at St Joseph’s Hospice, a Catholic establishment in Hackney, she fell in love with another Polish man, who died shortly thereafter, in the same year as her father and another friend of hers.
The grief she felt was overwhelming, and at this point she decided to dedicate her life to helping people at the end of theirs.
Dame Cicely in the early 1950s (Picture: Getty)
Her thinking was that ‘as the body becomes weaker, so the spirit becomes stronger’.
Two years after being awarded an OBE, Dame Cicely set-up the first ever purpose-built hospice St Christpher’s in 1967.
The motto was: ‘You matter because you are you, and you matter until the end of your life. We will do all we can not only to help you die peacefully, but also live until you die.’
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At the hospice, patients were not merely medically cared for, but were taken into the garden, visited by hairdressers and encouraged to socialise.
Pictured after becoming a doctor and establishing St Christopher’s (Picture: Getty)
The way music, performance and art was used to lift the quality of life of patients also went on to transform the way the NHS approached end-of-life care.
Through the late 1960s and 70s she gave hugely popular talks to the most influential doctors in the country on the nature of pain, and these talks helped re-mold modern medical ethics.
Her approach was that there was such a thing as ‘total pain’, in that you could be not just in physical pain, but also emotional, social, and spiritual distress.
Dame Cicely was one of the greatest humanitarians Britain has ever produced (Picture: Getty)
Dame Cicely’s work with the hospice meant she became a dame in 1979, and in 1981 she was awarded the Templeton Prize, the world’s richest annual prize awarded to an individual.
The Queen also awarded her the Order of Merit, and 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.
‘The door of hope must be shut slowly and gently’. Insightful words from Cicely Saunders' first publication, written while she was still a medical student. 'Dying of cancer', St Thomas’s Hospital Gazette, 56(2): 37-47; 1958. #CSCentenary #hpm — David Clark (@dumfriesshire) January 12, 2018
A year later she established the charitable organisation Cicely Saunders International, with the aim of ensuring as many people with progressive illnesses or who are reaching the end of their life could receive palliative care.
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A painting of Dame Cicely hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.
The Google Doodle image inspired by Dame Cicely (Picture: Google)
Despite losing two major loves in her life, Dame Cicely did get married at the age of 61.
In 1980 she wed Polish painter Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, who she’d known for many years and whose art adorned the walls of St Christopher became a patron of his art.
Bohusz-Szyszko died in 1995, at the age of 94, spending his last days at St Christopher’s Hospice. Saunders died of cancer ten years later at age 87, also at St Christopher’s Hospice.
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