A Centenary History of St Joseph's Hospice
| On 15 January 1905, a handful of Irish Sisters of Charity opened St Joseph’s Hospice, Hackney, to its first two patients. To commemorate one hundred years of care in the East End of London, David Clark and Michelle Winslow have worked in partnership with St Joseph’s to document its history in a centenary volume and an exhibition on public display throughout 2005. |
Within St Joseph’s Hospice, we were delighted to discover a well-preserved collection of documents which includes Annual Reports dating from 1907, correspondence tracking the struggle to retain independence from the NHS in the 1940s, minutes and reports from meetings over a number of years, annals by the religious Sisters, financial accounts, patient records, press cuttings and an abundance of photographs. As part of the project, this archive material has been catalogued and transferred into secure storage. The project also benefited from existing interviews in the Hospice History Programme, and some 45 new oral histories collected with people associated with St Joseph’s over many decades, including doctors, nurses, volunteers, porters, administrators, researchers, educators and representatives of different faiths.
The project has developed a historical account that is a celebration and a reflection of one hundred years of hospice care, while addressing past and present challenges and opportunities. In the field of hospice and palliative care, St Joseph’s has special significance. It is the oldest hospice in England to have stayed within its founding framework of governance - the Sisters of Charity. It serves a community characterised by a long history of both material poverty and deprivation as well as ethnic and cultural diversity. St Joseph’s also provided the context for Cicely Saunders’ early work and it has been a training ground for cohorts of doctors, nurses and others who went on to practise in hospice and palliative care settings around the world. Perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates how a hospice organisation can expand and change over time, adapt to altered circumstances, but retain its original mission and purpose.
Hence, this project represents an important historical undertaking which has produced a personal history for St Joseph’s and placed the hospice in the wider context of the hospice movement, nationally and internationally. The book is published by Observatory Publications and will be available from December 2005.
