Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a doctor whose purpose in life is the care of the dying.

The daughter of an estate agent, she went to Rodine and Oxford, trained as a nurse, and later as a doctor.

When she was 29, she fell in love with a young patient dying of cancer.

He left her a legacy of 500 pounds with the message that he wanted to be a window in her home,

a home she would open to help the dying. She realized that the

process of dying was a neglected area of medicine and starting with that bequest raised enough money

for a new kind of hospice. Two decades later in

1967 she opened St. Christopher's in Sydenum, South London. Today there are

190 similar hospices throughout the country, all of them caring for the dying

along the lines of her teaching.

She is Dame Sicily Saunders.

What's the essence of that teaching Dame Sicily? How do your hospices, as it were, differ from those

that you worked in as a girl? I think the most important thing is to get across to people

that this is an important part of

their lives and that you can sum up what you've been, you can reconcile yourself

with some of the situations that you may be unhappy with.

In fact, there may be a lot to do.

You needn't necessarily be sure that you're reaching the end of your life,

but somewhere within yourself will be that

knowledge and I think hospice is about living until you die and it may be much longer

...