Roland spent his early years at God's Lake, 603 kilometres north of Winnipeg, where his father was the mine accountant.
In his final year of high school, his father entered a Toronto sanitarium for tuberculosis and the family relocated to be near him.
He earned university tuition by working as a bellhop at Chateau Lake Louise in Alberta where he became a mountain climber.
He was heavily involved in the rescue of three Mexican climbers stuck on a glacier after four of their friends fell to their death.
In 1964, Roland took a position at the Journal of the American Medical Association, based in Chicago and taught the history of medicine at Northwestern University.
[citation needed] In 1977, McMaster University recruited him as its inaugural Hannah Professor of the History of Medicine at its new medical school.