Edith Mae Irby was about 7 years old in the early 1930s when her older siblings contracted typhoid fever in their little house in Conway, Ark. Her brother Robert recovered, but her sister, Juanita, died.

Edith could never shake the awful sense that Juanita had received substandard care because her family was poor. She recalled that a doctor had visited Juanita just once during her illness while spending more time tending to better-off typhoid patients living nearby.

At that young age, Edith resolved to become a doctor who would find her reward in service, not wealth.

“I was going to particularly see those who did not have money and those who were less fortunate, who would get the kind of care that they needed,” she said as Dr. Edith Irby Jones in a 2006 oral history interview at the University of Arkansas.