HermanusTimes

The month of May has been earmarked to promote awareness of Hospice and to pay tribute to those individuals who were, and are, brave enough to face the reality of death and walk this part of life's journey with the patients they care for.

In the absence of modern medicine, superstition dominated in tribal and pre-Christian eras. The sick or injured were either regarded as a threat to the survival of a whole community or a liability and many were excluded from their communities to heal or die on their own. The responsibility of caring for the ill and dying fell to either family members or the tribes' 'medicine' men or women.

The word hospice comes from the Latin word “hospes” meaning “to host a guest or stranger”. As Christianity started to spread through Europe, monasteries started to take in and care for the sick. Monasteries were the hospitals or hospices of the middle ages and wealthy women and widows in the sixth and seventh centuries, who took care of the ill at these monasteries, were the first “nurses”.

As medicine developed and the first hospitals appeared, little was still understood about germs and the spread of disease. Hospitals were often referred to as “the house of death” and many families still preferred to care for their loved ones at home.

Jeanne Garnier founded the Dames de Calaire in Lyon, France in 1842. This was the first time the word hospice was used to refer to caring for dying patients. In 1879 the Irish Sisters of Charity opened Our Ladys Hospice in Dublin followed by St Joseph''s Hospice in Hackney, London in 1905. The person regarded as the founder of the global hospice movement was Dame Cicely Saunders, a nurse and medical social worker who opened the St Christpher's Hospice in 1967 after caring for a terminally ill patient, David Tasma. Saunders shared her dream of opening a place dedicated to pain control and helping people prepare for death in a dignified manner with her patient and after his death Tasma left Saunders ?500 to pursue her goal. In 1969 Dr Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's book On Death and Dying was published. Most of the 500 patients Kubler-Ross interviewed stated that they preferred home-based care and that they wanted to be involved in decisions about their treatment. The book contributed a great deal to encouraging open discussions about dying which has become the cornerstone of the modern hospice movement.