The first hospice in the United States was launched at Yale–New Haven Hospital in 1974. By the early 1980s, hospices for cancer patients built on Saunders’s model had sprouted up worldwide—most prominently in Britain, where nearly two hundred hospice centers were operating by the end of that decade. Saunders refused to recognize this enterprise as pitted “against” cancer. “The provision of… terminal care,” she wrote, “should not be thought of as a separate and essentially negative part of the attack on cancer. This is not merely the phase of defeat, hard to contemplate and unrewarding to carry
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