ABSTRACT
Idealism, enormous popular enthusiasm, vigorous growth and diversification are the hallmarks of the modern hospice. For a quarter of a century energetic community groups-schools, churches, women’s groups, rotarians-have joined with major charities, NHS staff and eventually government to plan and finance a thirty-fold increase in hospice provision. The sense of local ownership, of ‘our hospice’, is crucial but intriguing. It suggests that in the late twentieth century British public imagination was and is sufficiently captured by a ‘vision’ to want to invest in a local death service. While life and death, mortality and morality are ancient enigmas they have contemporary manifestations.1 Hospices are one such manifestation.
