Remembering Dr. Jimmie Holland

In the early 1970s, as doctors began to turn the tide against childhood leukemia, they often met after work at the Hollands’ home in north Buffalo. Dr. James Holland directed the Acute Leukemia Group B (ALGB), which was headquartered at the nearby Roswell Park Hospital.

One evening, his wife, Jimmie, a doctor herself, asked the ALGB members if they were considering the patients’ mental states in the campaign against cancer. The leukemia doctors answered no. They were too busy saving lives. Feelings, emotions, the mental state of affairs? They would catch up to such aspects of care once they put more patients into remission.

“I couldn’t help thinking that there was more to focus on there,” Jimmie Holland told me when I was researching Cancer Crossings: A Brother, His Doctors and the Quest to Cure Childhood Leukemia, which will be out this spring from Cornell Press.

Her question led to the first studies about the psychological impact of a cancer diagnosis on patients and even their families. Dr. Holland died a few weeks ago, on Christmas Eve. She was 89 years old.

Born in Nevada, Texas, Jimmie Holland was first going to be nurse, but she soon realized that she could do more as a doctor. She attended Baylor University’s medical school in Houston, where she was one of three women in a class of nearly 90.

“Three women, three Jews,” she recalled, “the usual quota for Texas.”

On a visit to Buffalo to see a friend who was a surgical fellow at Roswell Park, she met James Holland. They soon married and eventually had six children. At the time of their “kitchen think tank” talks, Jimmie was working part-time at the University of Buffalo’s School of Medicine and as head of psychiatry at Erie County Medical Center. Still, everyone knew that the real advances in cancer were being made at Roswell Park in downtown Buffalo.

Jimmie asked her husband if he would help her start a committee to study how and what cancer patients felt during treatments – the mental side of things. From such beginnings, Jimmie Holland became one of the founders of psychological oncology, a specialty that explores the psychological, social, behavioral and ethical aspects of cancer.

One of her early patients summed up the need for such an approach. “They have measured everything but my thoughts and mind,” Holland quoted him as saying in her book, The Human Side of Cancer. “Somehow, my mental attitude, the stress, the anguish should be analyzed and studied the same as my physical condition.”

In the years after the conversations around her kitchen table in Buffalo, Jimmie Holland would go on to write the first textbook on psycho-oncology and start the psychiatry service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

“We’ve lost a remarkable woman,” says Dr. William Breitbart, “a once-in-a-lifetime generation influencer.”