Centers of the Cancer Universe by Donald L. Trump & Eric T. Rosenthal

Author:Donald L. Trump & Eric T. Rosenthal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Published: 2021-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

THE BIRTH OF PSYCHO-ONCOLOGY

But there was also another observer during the Holland kitchen conferences. Jim Holland’s wife, Jimmie C. Holland, MD, was a young psychiatrist and mother of their five children who served on the part-time psychiatry faculty at the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and was head of psychiatry at Erie County Medical Center. In what may have been her last interview prior to her death on December 24, 2017, at age eighty-nine, she told coauthor Eric Rosenthal in a MedPage Today article that she “was fascinated by the stress response and by delusional states and what was going on in someone’s brain that distorted their view of what was happening around them.”63

She said that she had spent many evenings listening to her husband and his colleagues discuss the early development of chemotherapy and how it was making a real difference in pediatric ALL. “It was an exciting time in chemo-therapy with new drugs coming down the pike, and I’d asked them if they asked their patients how they felt about their cancer, which helped develop my interest in issues relating to the psychological care and support of patients facing catastrophic diseases,” she said.

But in those days, she added, medical oncologists weren’t paying much attention to how their patients felt or to their patients’ quality of life. “They were too engaged in the big problem of finding cures and thought my concerns were just temporary stopgaps. But I was around when we saw the first Hodgkin’s survivors. In the 1960s, we suddenly began to see people surviving,” she said.

Holland noted that when her husband was chairman of CALGB, he made it a multidisciplinary group and she asked him to start a psychiatry committee. “And that’s how it happened, and it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been married to him,” she said, adding that being involved in CALGB allowed the fledgling psychosocial oncology field to add quality-of-life questions into larger protocols, and that the first two psychosocial studies were done with that cooperative group.

Jimmie Holland would go on to establish the field of psycho-oncology and would eventually help create the first full-time psychiatric service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she continued to practice until her death.

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