in institutions as hospitals and nursing homes, along with at-home care. The first modern hospice care was created by Dame Cicely Saunders in 1967. Saunders was a British registered nurse whose chronic health problems forced her to pursue a career in medical social work. The relationship she developed with a dying Polish refugee helped solidify her ideas that terminally ill patients needed compassionate care to help address their fears and concerns as well as palliative comfort for physical symptoms. After the refugee's death, Saunders began volunteering at St Luke's Home for the Dying Poor, where a physician told her that she could best influence the treatment of the terminally ill as a physician. Saunders entered medical school while continuing her volunteer work at St. Joseph's. When she completed her degree in 1957, she took a position there. Saunders emphasized focusing on the patient rather than the disease and introduced the notion of 'total pain', which included psychological and spiritual as well as physical discomfort. She experimented with opioids for controlling physical pain. She also considered the needs of the patient's family. She developed many foundational principles of modern hospice care at St Joseph's. Over the years these centers became more common and from the 1970s this is where they placed people to live out their final days. She disseminated her philosophy internationally in a series of tours of the United States that began in 1963. In 1967, Saunders opened St Christopher's Hospice. Florence Wald, the dean of Yale School of Nursing, who had heard Saunders speak in America, spent a month working with Saunders there in 1969 before bringing the principles of modern hospice care back to the United States, establishing Hospice, Inc. in 1971. Another early hospice program in the United States, Alive Hospice, was founded in Nashville, Tennessee, on November 14, 1975. By 1977 the National Hospice Organization had been formed, and by 1979, a president, Ann G. Blues, had been elected and principles of hospice care had been addressed. At about the same time that Saunders was disseminating her theories and developing her hospice, in 1965, Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross began to consider social responses to terminal illness, which she found inadequate at the Chicago hospital where her American physician husband was employed. Her 1969 best-seller, On Death and Dying, influenced the medical profession's response to the terminally ill. Saunders and other thanatology pioneers helped to focus