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Today, hospice is an accepted part of American medicine. One out of three terminally ill Americans uses hospice care. People increasingly assume that hospice is part of the dying process. They also assume a key hospice principle: that people should be cared for in such a way that they can live fully until they die. Few realize that the modern hospice movement is young and that Christian faith motivated its founder.

The modern hospice movement is rooted in a much older idea of hospitality. Indeed, the term comes from the same Latin root as hospital and hostel. Places of hospitality were not confined to the Latin-speaking world, however. Greeks, Indians, Romans, early Christians, and Muslims all built places where pilgrims and travelers, particularly the sick, could rest and find care. In modern times, Christians showed their commitment to hospitality for the hurting by building hospitals and, at the end of the 19th century, the first institutions dedicated solely to caring for the dying. Called hospices, these institutions lacked the fully formed philosophy that would characterize the modern movement, they but did offer inspiration to the movement's founder, Dame Cicely Saunders.

Saunders established the first modern hospice, St. Christopher's, in 1967. Located in London, St. Christopher's was the result of Saunders' experience treating dying people, her belief that people could flourish even as they died, and her sense of Christian call.

Saunders' route to both medicine and faith took some time. Born in 1918, she went to Oxford in 1938 and studied politics, philosophy, and economics. World War II sent her on a different path. She stopped her studies in 1940 to become a nurse. When a bad back forced her from nursing in 1944, she returned to school and became a medical social worker. In the midst of her schooling, she went on vacation with some Christian friends and converted to Christianity. "It was as though I suddenly felt the wind behind me rather in my face," she reflected afterward.

In 1947, it became clearer what she would do with God's strength at her back. While working at a London hospital, she met David Tasma, a Polish survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and a terminally ill cancer patient. They fell in love. They also agreed that the care dying people received did not allow dying to be what it could be: a time to make peace with friends, family, and one's own life. When Tasma died, he left Saunders his fortune of 500 pounds and told her, "I'll be a window in your home." Saunders later remembered that David's words felt like God tapping her on the shoulder and saying, "You've got to get on with it."

Getting on with it was not simple. Saunders worked for several more years among the dying before training to be a doctor. After completing her studies, she worked at St. Joseph's, one of the hospices started by the Catholic Church at the end of the 19th century. There she began to develop and disseminate her philosophy about caring for dying people. Saunders recognized that terminally ill patients dealt with more than physical pain. Doctors needed to consider their "total pain," or the combination of their physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental pain. Rather than acceding to the medical field's final words on a dying patient—"there is nothing more we can do"—Saunders proposed that the medical community could do much. In addition to managing pain, Saunders advocated listening to patients' stories and concerns and responding with emotional and spiritual support.

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