Word: dame
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...inspired by a gift from a dying patient and armed with an indomitable determination, Dame Cicely opened St. Christopher's, the world's first modern hospice. In doing so, she changed the impersonal, technocratic approach to death that since World War II has become endemic in overwhelmed Western hospitals. No heroic efforts were made to prolong life. There was no operating theater; no temperatures were taken or pulses recorded. Instead of specialists mumbling into charts, there were doctors sitting at bedsides holding patients' trembling hands. When death came, it was not with the accompaniment of IV drips and respirators...
...Although Dame Cicely is a symbol of caring medicine to doctors and nurses around the world, today she is more administrator than practicing physician. Three years ago, she handed over the job of medical director to Dr. Tom West, 58, her close friend of many years, and became chairman of the hospice's management council. She continues, though, to keep a firm hand on her 62-bed hospice, doing weekend medical duty once a month, regularly dropping by to chat with patients and dispensing advice to doctors...
...fervor, during which she was a Billy Graham counselor, before she finally settled into the Anglican church. Her faith created much apprehension among doctors when St. Christopher's first opened. "We suspected she wanted to produce deathbed conversions," says Consulting Psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes. "How wrong we were." Insists Dame Cicely: "There's an absolutely built-in rule that there are no religious pressures here...
...modern roots in a home for the dying opened in Dublin in the late 19th century by an associate of Florence Nightingale's. Not long after, the Sisters of Charity opened a similar home in London. It was largely at that home, in the 1950s and 1960s, that Dame Cicely developed her ideas for a modern hospice that would bring physical and spiritual peace in the face of death. The end of life "can turn out to be the most important part," says...
...powerful reason why that is true at St. Christopher's is the system of pain control developed by Dame Cicely and others. The hospice only admits patients with terminal cancer or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, the motor-neuron illness commonly known in the U.S. as Lou Gehrig's disease. Fully 60% of new arrivals suffer from pain that has been consuming them, sometimes for weeks. With a combination of morphine and other drugs, such as tranquilizers, administered every four hours, the pain is quickly eliminated for most patients. But other components of pain are, in their way, equally agonizing...