MEET LOCAL LEGEND: Edith Irby Jones, M.D.

BIOGRAPHY

Edith Irby Jones, a trailblazer for over 50 years in medicine and bringing health care to those most in need, was inspired to become a doctor by the death of her older sister during a typhoid epidemic in Arkansas in the 1930s.

The daughter of a sharecropper (who died in a riding accident when she was eight) and a domestic worker, Jones recalls thinking, "The children who were able to have medical care would live; I saw the doctor going in and out of their homes. Although it may not be true, I felt that if I had been a physician, or if there had been physicians available, or we had adequate money,-that a physician would have come to us."

As it was, a doctor saw Jones' sister only once -- the family could afford no more -- and she died. It was a life-defining experience for Jones, who in 1948 broke racial barriers and made national news when she became the first African-American to attend the University of Arkansas School of Medicine. She received her M.D. in 1952.

Nominated as a Local Legend by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX-18), Jones was the first African-American woman resident at Baylor College of Medicine Affiliated Hospitals in Houston and the first female president of the National Medical Association. She is a charter member of Physicians for Human Rights, and the Chief of the medical staff at Riverside General Hospital in Houston.

After a successful career in Arkansas, Dr. Jones established a private practice in internal medicine and gerontology in inner city Houston in 1962. A co-founder of Houston's Mercy Hospital, she also has taught and consulted on health care in several countries and established medical clinics in Veracruz, Mexico and Vaudreuil, Haiti.

Sheila Jackson emphasizes that "What truly makes Dr. Jones stand out is her deep desire to help the less fortunate. She has founded or collaborated in the creation of numerous medical clinics throughout Latin America."

While in Arkansas, Dr. Jones worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights movement and was a member of the "Freedom Four" (along with Attorneys Floyd Davis, Harold Flowers, and Bob Booker), speaking out mostly across the Deep South at churches and private homes to urge people to join the struggle for justice and equality.

Recipient of numerous awards and citations, the City of Houston honored her in 1986 with an Edith Irby Jones Day. In 1988, the America Society of Medicine named her Internist of the Year and, in 1998, the former Southeast Memorial Hospital named its ambulatory center in her honor.

These days when she speaks to students at Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Jones focuses on her values: "I let them know the real truth, that if they are really concerned about their fellow man, they will enjoy medicine. If they are going into medicine as a money making project, then they ought to select something else; medicine continues to be a service that we render to all."