DAME CICELY SAUNDERS earned gratitude, admiration and international renown for helping to alleviate the suffering of terminally ill people.

Hundreds of hospices in Britain and more than 95 other countries are modelled on St Christopher’s, Sydenham, the hospice which she established in 1967.

St Christopher’s, on her initiative, attempted for the first time to provide patient-centred palliative care for the terminally ill, combining emotional, spiritual and social support with expert medical and nursing care. Its practices have since been widely copied and developed. Today St Christopher’s cares for about 2,000 patients and their families each year and, in training more than 60,000 health professionals, has influenced standards of care for the dying throughout the world.

Despite coming late in life to her vocation — she trained in turn as a nurse, almoner, medical secretary and doctor, before opening St Christopher’s — by the time she died Saunders had gained a place in public esteem almost comparable to that occupied by Florence Nightingale.

She had, in fact, begun her training in 1940 as a Nightingale nurse. A shy, tall, gawky young woman, she had felt the need for some stronger wartime commitment than the completion of an Oxford degree — a task to which she returned when a lifelong back defect made a nursing career impossible, before going on to qualify as a hospital social worker. But for all her dedication, much strengthened by her conversion to evangelical Christianity, Saunders was for long uncertain how best to deploy her passionate concern for the sick and suffering.

She was in many ways an old-fashioned woman, a charismatic grande dame with strong values and a great talent for leadership. She was such a remarkable innovator in the treatment of physical and psychological pain that she eventually held fellowships in the Royal College of Physicians (1974), the Royal College of Nursing (1981) and the Royal College of Surgeons (1986).

She was awarded the esteemed Templeton, Onassis and Wallenberg prizes, a score of honorary degrees and medals, was advanced from OBE (1967) to DBE in 1980 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1989. In 2001 she was awarded the million-dollar Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize.

None of this was easily achieved. Born Cicely Mary Strode Saunders in Barnet, North London, in 1918, she was the eldest daughter of a prosperous, domineering estate agent, whose unhappy marriage to a dependent wife broke up in 1945, the critical year in which Saunders graduated from Oxford and abruptly exchanged the agnosticism in which she had grown up for an earnest religious search for a mission.

She was unhappy at home, even more unhappy at Roedean, eager for a partnership in life which she could not find among her widening circle of colleagues and friends. Seeking a better-matched relationship than her parents, she found it only in middle age, with the émigré Polish painter Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, a Catholic, whom she married in 1980, after the death of his separated wife in Poland.

Other Poles had earlier played a decisive role in her life. Saunders herself wondered why she felt such a lifelong attraction towards things and persons Polish. She attributed much of it to an intimate but unconsummated love for a dying patient, David Tasma, a refugee from the Warsaw ghetto, whom she met on her first rounds as an almoner at St Thomas’s. He was a friendless waiter with no family, and there was no consolation for him except in the love which she discovered to be within her reach. It was then that she saw how the pain of cancer could be tamed by modern drugs and that unavoidable distress could be made tolerable by a form of care that ranked the physical and spiritual needs of the patient together.

Tasma bequeathed her all his worldly goods, £500, which she treasured for years until she found a way to give full effect to his cryptic wish that it should be “a window in your home”. His gift is now commemorated in the entrance to St Christopher’s.

Her experience as a volunteer in St Luke’s, the Bayswater Home for the Dying Poor, persuaded Saunders to challenge the received medical wisdom about dying, death and bereavement. She put herself back to school, studied physics and chemistry and qualified as a doctor when she was 38. She then combined membership of a research group on pain, set up at St Mary’s, Paddington, with her continuing ward work — this time at St Joseph’s Hackney, where the Sisters of Charity showed her how much might be done for the dying by sustained loving care; and where she, in turn, began to bring into play her more unorthodox ideas about pain relief.

What she then demonstrated, and what is now widely adopted, was that intermittent reactive sedation of surging pain was far less effective than achieving a steady state in which the dying patient could still maintain consciousness and even life with some quality.

At St Joseph’s Saunders met the second of the Poles who changed her life. The transfiguration of Antoni Michniewicz showed her what dying might be like when love could be given and received. His death inspired her in her plan to found St Christopher’s — named, appropriately, after the patron saint of travellers — as a place to find shelter on the most difficult part of life’s journey.

St Christopher’s was to cater primarily for cancer patients, because Saunders had seen a gap in NHS provision, highlighted by a 1952 Marie Curie Foundation survey of their needs and a later Gulbenkian report on the care of the chronic sick — a perspective which today carries the principles and practice of palliative care beyond the initial concern with cancer.

It took years of planning and financing to open a purpose- built hospice on the Sydenham site. There Saunders explored all the possibilities for matching quality medical care with support for patients and their families at home, changing existing medical and social attitudes about the care of the dying. Through the struggles for financial and professional backing, in which Saunders proved herself as a medical director, a fundraiser of quiet genius, a relentless administrator and a proponent of the hospice idea on the world stage, it was clear that she was achieving exactly what she set out to do.

The change she accomplished in medical attitudes was most notably recognised when the Royal College of Physicians established palliative medicine as a distinct medical specialism.

When the Cicely Saunders Foundation was launched in 2002, her reputation attracted leading specialists from North America and Australia to its international scientific advisory panel. The foundation aims to promote research into all aspects of palliative medicine and care for the dying, with particular emphasis on collaborations between different professions in healthcare, clinical and non-clinical services, to improve the integration between research and practice.

Many years ago, in response to a question at a symposium about the prospect of death, Saunders declared that she would hope for a sudden demise but would prefer to die — as she has — with a cancer that gave due notice and allowed the time to reflect on life and to put one’s practical and spiritual affairs in order.

Her husband, Marian Bohusz-Szysko, died in 1995, aged 92.

Dame Cicely Saunders, OM, DBE, the founder of the modern hospice movement, was born on June 22, 1918. She died on July 14, 2005, aged 87.