Jimmie Coker Holland was a founder of the field of psycho-oncology. In 1977, she worked with two colleagues to establish a full-time psychiatric service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The program was one of the first of its kind in cancer treatment, and trained its psychologists to specialize in issues specific to people with cancer.
Biography
Born in Nevada, Texas, in 1928, Holland earned her medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, in 1952, and received her board certification in psychiatry in 1966. She taught and practiced at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and Montefiore Hospital of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. Holland was chief of the Psychiatry Service, which she helped create, for New York'sMemorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center from 1977 to 1996. Holland held a named chair at MSK, the Wayne E. Chapman Chair in Psychiatric Oncology. During her years at MSK, Holland created the nation's largest training and research program in psycho-oncology. In 1984, she produced for Sloan-Kettering the first syllabus on psycho-oncology and, in 1989, was senior editor of the first textbook on the subject. Holland founded the AmericanPsychosocial Oncology Society in 1980, and co-founded the International Psycho-Oncology Society in 1984. She is also credited with putting psychosocial and behavioral research on the agenda of the American Cancer Society in the early 1980s. She was a co-editor-in-chief of the journal Psycho-Oncology. The ACS awarded her its Medal of Honor for Clinical Research in 1994. She was elected a Fellow in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1995, and received the Presidential Commendation from the American Psychiatric Association in 2000, among many other awards. Her husband, James F. Holland, was an oncologist and an important figure in the early development of cancer chemotherapy. Her interest in the field of psycho-oncology arose in part from discussions with her husband about the patients he treated, and the understanding that arose from those discussions that little was known about the experiences of people with cancer and that little was being done to help people with cancer manage the experience. Holland died of complications of cardiovascular disease on December 24, 2017, at the age of 89.
