Relationships
In 1948 she fell in love with a patient, David Tasma, a Polish-Jewish refugee who, having escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, worked as a waiter; he was dying of cancer. He left her £500 to be "a window in your home". That act, which helped germinate the idea that became St Christopher's is remembered by a plain sheet of glass in the entrance to the hospice.
While training for social work, she holidayed with some Christians, and went through a conversion experience. In the late 1940s, Saunders began working part-time at St Luke's Home for the Dying Poor in Bayswater, and it was partly this which, in 1951, led her to begin study at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School to become a physician. She qualified MBBS in 1957.
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