Edith Irby Jones, trailblazer for African American doctors, dies at 91

Edith Irby Jones, who would grow up to be a pioneering African American doctor, was a young girl in rural Arkansas when she lost a sister to typhoid fever in the 1930s. “The children who were able to have medical care would live,” Dr. Jones told an interviewer years later. “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.” Amid the tragedy of her sister’s death, and perhaps unaware of the obstacles she would face, she vowed to become a doctor — but a “different kind of doctor,” she said. “Money wasn’t going to make any difference with me,” Dr. Jones told an oral historian with the University of Arkansas Libraries. “And so I have spent my lifetime trying to live out a childhood dream.” Read More…