The word hospice derives from the Latin hospitium, meaning a guest. The original hospices date back to the Middle Ages when religious orders set up charitable monastic institutions.
The hospice as we know it today started in the late 19th century. St Joseph's Hospice in London's East End was where Dame Cecily Saunders worked for several years as a junior doctor. So the concept was established before she set up St Christopher's in 1967. However, she was the one who made palliative care medically and socially acceptable.
The term "palliative" was introduced by Prof Balfour Mount from Montreal. In the French-speaking world, hospice had an established non-medical meaning. It was this, allied to a desire to move away from the "terminal" label which has lead to the modern nomenclature of "palliative care". In fact the first recorded use of "palliative" was in an 1890 paper in the British Medical Journal by Dr John Snow on the medical uses of opium.