It would take a full decade for Saunders’s movement to travel to America and penetrate its optimism-fortified oncology wards. “The resistance to providing palliative care to patients,” a ward nurse recalls, “was so deep that doctors would not even look us in the eye when we recommended that they stop their efforts to save lives and start saving dignity instead… doctors were allergic to the smell of death. Death meant failure, defeat—their death, the death of medicine, the death of oncology.”
