26/07/2026
Inspiring story about a Social Worker. I recall the hospice set up at the former home for the aged beside SM North (DSWD-GRACES) and the private one by Asec. Lucentales (first time I heard there was one such facility in the Philippines).
Always humbled, blessed and proud walking with RSWs at DSWD.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19EispGsxS/
"Cicely Saunders is 29 years old, working as a medical social worker in a London hospital, when she meets a man who will change the course of modern medicine.
His name is David Tasma. He is 40 years old, a Polish Jewish refugee who fled the Warsaw Ghetto. He is dying of cancer, alone, in a busy 50-bed hospital ward.
Cicely visits him again and again. They talk for hours. He tells her what he needs isn't more medicine. He needs someone to simply be present with him.
1948.
David Tasma dies. Before he goes, he leaves Cicely £500, a fortune at the time, and six words that will stay with her for the next 19 years.
"I'll be a window in your home," he tells her.
Cicely doesn't know it yet, but she has just been handed her life's mission.
At the time, dying patients in Britain's hospitals are treated as failures. Doctors have nothing left to offer them, so they are pushed to the margins, into isolated wards, and largely forgotten.
Pain medication is given on a fixed schedule, only after the pain has already returned. Patients spend their final weeks watching the clock, terrified of the agony that creeps back before the next dose.
Cicely already trained as a nurse, qualifying in 1944. But chronic back pain forced her out of the wards. She became a hospital almoner instead, one of the few roles that let her stay close to patients.
Now, at 33 years old, she makes a decision almost nobody expects. She goes back to school. Not for nursing. Not for social work. For medicine.
Here's what makes it worse: senior doctors tell her not to bother. Pain control for the dying, they say, isn't real medicine. It isn't worth a medical degree. Some suggest she's wasting her training on patients who can't be saved anyway.
Cicely doesn't listen.
1957. At 39 years old, Cicely Saunders qualifies as a physician. She takes a research post at St Joseph's Hospice in London and begins something no doctor before her has done with this level of rigor: she studies pain itself, patient by patient.
She interviews the dying about exactly where it hurts, how it feels, and when it returns. She tracks their answers like data. She discovers something the medical establishment has ignored for decades: give pain medication regularly, before the pain returns, and patients stay alert, comfortable, and free of fear until the very end.
She calls it "total pain." Physical pain, yes, but also emotional, social, and spiritual suffering, all tangled together, all requiring care.
It sounds obvious now. In the 1950s, it is radical.
1959. Cicely starts fundraising for a hospice built entirely around this idea. A place with proper research, proper teaching, and proper pain relief, wrapped in the ordinary comforts of home.
She tours hospitals and lecture halls across Britain and the United States, asking for donations one conversation at a time. Boards reject her. Some call the whole idea unnecessary, arguing hospitals already do everything medicine allows.
Here's what makes it worse: by the mid-1960s, dying patients across the country are still being told, "there is nothing more we can do." Cicely has spent almost two decades trying to prove that sentence wrong.
By 1966, after seven years of relentless fundraising, she has raised more than £400,000, an extraordinary sum for a hospital nobody in power thinks Britain needs.
July 24, 1967. St Christopher's Hospice opens its doors in Sydenham, South London. Fifty-four beds. A research wing. A teaching program. And, above the entrance, a plain glass window dedicated to the man who started it all: David Tasma.
Nineteen years after his promise, Cicely has built her window.
1969. Two years after opening, St Christopher's launches Britain's first hospice home care team, carrying pain relief and dignity directly into patients' own houses.
Word spreads. American nurse Florence Wald visits St Christopher's, studies Cicely's methods, and carries them home to found the hospice movement in the United States. Doctors from dozens of other countries follow.
Cicely tells her patients something simple, something that becomes the philosophy behind every hospice built in her name: "You matter because you are you. You matter to the last moment of your life, and we will do all we can, not only to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die."
By the time Cicely Saunders dies in 2005, at 87 years old, palliative medicine is a recognized medical specialty. Hospice and palliative care now reach patients in more than 100 countries, all tracing back to one small hospice in South London, and one dying man's £500 gift.
She dies at St Christopher's Hospice itself, the home she spent her life building, surrounded by the kind of care she fought decades to make possible.
Every hospice patient who dies without unmanaged pain, every family allowed to say goodbye without a clock ticking down to the next dose, owes something to a 29-year-old social worker who refused to accept that nothing more could be done.
Someone who needs to know - dignity at the end of life isn't automatic. Someone had to fight for it."
