She died dec 24, 2017 at the age of 89
It may sound a bit odd, but I’ve always been a reader of the newspaper obituary section. It’s quite educational and the same time humbling to read about the lives of people from not only my local community, but the world at large. I first learned about the incredible physician Dr Jimmie Holland from the NYTimes obituary pages last week. It’s embarrassing that I was unfamiliar with her work, because her work has had a big influence on many of us- whether we are patients or health care providers.
some background
It may sound impossible in today’s culture- where sharing personal information is more the norm than exception, but it wasn’t all that long ago that a cancer diagnosis was shrouded in secrecy, and shame. There was tremendous stigma surrounding this disease, possibly because it seemed to strike suddenly and was almost uniformly lethal. It made ‘well’ people uncomfortable. As a consequence, people with cancer and their loved ones, suffered in silence. And suffer they did.
If took the forthrightness of celebrities such as First Lady Betty Ford and former children star- Ambassador Shirley Temple Black, who in the 1970’s publicly discussed their breast cancer diagnoses, to help break this wall of silence.
And there was also a pioneering psychiatrist, Dr Jimmie Holland who helped revolutionize the treatment of people with serious illness. She placed emphasis on the importance of ‘the psychological care of the medically ill’, and her particular area of interest involved patients with cancer.
her legacy
Dr Holland was a pioneer on many levels.
Growing up in a small rural town in Texas, her parents did not even have high school diplomas- but off to college and then medical school she went. She was 1 of only 3 women in her 1952 medical school class (now med schools are approximately 50/50 men/women or even slightly more women than men). Her pioneering work explored how ‘individuals dealt with catastrophic disease’ which led to the creation of ‘the discipline known as psycho-oncology’.
Part of her legacy was understanding that there’s more to treating a patient than just the specific physical/physiologic challenges of treating the disease. She felt that financial concerns, family struggles, child care, spiritual issues for example, have significant impact on the health of patients, and her research corroborated this truth. She advocated that these issues should not be ignored by providers, but should be addressed as a integral part of the overall treatment plan. The tool to help quantify these additional co-morbidities, ‘the distress thermometer’, is part of her legacy,
This stuff may sound obvious today, but when she started her career few thought this an important line of research. Basically, she was advocating for a more holistic way of looking at patients with serious/complicated illness.
Due to her trailblazing work, suffering in silence is no longer a given.
So thank you Dr Holland. We all owe you a great debt of gratitude.
Read one of her last published interviews.
Thank you for sharing this. I had seen a YouTube posted recently in honor of her – there are actually several she has done – I liked this one… it is amazing to think about the transition of transparency and stigma…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC1RReDUFN8