Mary Baines: community palliative care pioneer

One day in the mid-1960s Mary Baines heard a radio appeal for a hospice by Cicely Saunders, whom she had met in the Christian Union at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, in 1954. Baines sent her old friend a cheque for £3, even though she thought Saunders’s proposal “very odd.”

In 2014, Baines recalled, “Doctors, at this time, had no interest in people who were dying. They were only interested in people who could be cured. If you’d asked me whether I thought anything would have come of it, I would have said no. If you think of it, it is incredible. Can you think of any woman, or any man for that matter, who founded not only a hospice, but a branch of medicine around the world?”