The Irish Sisters of Charity established St. Joseph's Hospice in London, England in 1902, and have a prominent place in the history of hospice care.

In the 1950s, Dame Cecily Saunders developed many of the foundational principles of modern hospice care at St. Joseph's. Saunders noticed that many of the patients were more pain-free than elsewhere and, looking for the reason, found that the nuns were treating patients with morphine once every four hours.
This became the cornerstone for her policy of giving analgesics “by the clock.”

Connor, S R. Hospice: Practice, Pitfalls, and Promise. Taylor & Francis, 1998. p. 5.