# Fitzhugh Mullan

Source: https://onco.cc/people/fitzhugh-mullan/  
OnCo record `fitzhugh-mullan` (Person). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Wrote the 1985 essay that gave cancer survivorship its name and its first framework, then co-founded the organisation that changed what people treated for cancer are called.

## Summary

Fitzhugh Mullan was a physician who had been treated for cancer; the Institute of Medicine's 2006 survivorship report describes him as "a physician and cancer survivor". In July 1985 the New England Journal of Medicine published his essay "Seasons of survival: reflections of a physician with cancer", which divided survival into acute, extended and permanent seasons and argued that the time after treatment was unmapped territory with hazards of its own. The Institute of Medicine's 2006 survivorship report opens by quoting his challenge: "The challenge in overcoming cancer is not only to find therapies that will prevent or arrest the disease quickly, but also to map the middle ground of survivorship and minimize its medical and social hazards".

The following year he was a co-founder of the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship, formed by twenty-three people in Albuquerque, New Mexico in October 1986, and served as its founding president. The organisation's purpose was to replace the words "cancer victim" with "cancer survivor" and to define a survivor as someone living with cancer from diagnosis for the balance of life, which is the definition the National Cancer Institute uses today and credits to the coalition.

His later writing was largely in health policy rather than in oncology, and Health Affairs maintains a reading list of it. He died; The Lancet published an obituary in its issue of January 2020 and Health Affairs a final conversation with him in February 2020. OnCo has not read the 1985 essay itself, which is paywalled and carries no abstract in Europe PMC, and takes the quotation above from the Institute of Medicine report that reproduces it.

## Fields

- Kind: Person
- Last checked: 2026-10-02
- Tags: survivorship; history; advocacy
- Role: Physician and writer; founding president of the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship
- Specialisms: Cancer survivorship; Health policy; Patient advocacy

## Sources

- Mullan, Seasons of survival: reflections of a physician with cancer (New England Journal of Medicine 1985;313:270-273): https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM198507253130421
- National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship (now Cancer Nation): Our History: https://canceradvocacy.org/about/our-history/
- From Cancer Patient to Cancer Survivor: Lost in Transition, executive summary (National Academies Press reader): https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/11468/chapter/2

## Connected records

- terms: [Lost in Transition: the 2006 report that defined survivorship care, and the care plan it invented](https://onco.cc/terms/rejuv-history-lost-in-transition/), [Seasons of Survival: the 1985 essay that named the problem](https://onco.cc/terms/rejuv-history-seasons-of-survival/), [The founding of the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship, and the word survivor](https://onco.cc/terms/rejuv-history-survivorship-movement/)
- technologies: [The word survivor, and why the vocabulary is not a detail](https://onco.cc/technologies/rejuv-mind-the-word-survivor/)
- roadmaps: [Recovery and rejuvenation roadmap: cure is not enough → survivorship gets a name → the cohorts that measured the cost → exercise proven as treatment → biological ageing measured and sold → repair, if anyone funds it](https://onco.cc/roadmaps/rejuvenation-roadmap/)
- fronts: [Recovery & Rejuvenation](https://onco.cc/fronts/rejuvenation/), [Supportive Care & Survivorship](https://onco.cc/fronts/supportive-care/)

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