Edwin Brown Jenks, M.D. (1877-1945), a member of the Class of 1901 at New York Medical College, was the founder of the Diamond Point Emergency Medical Service, the first rural emergency medical service in New York State.
Dr. Jenks is part of the Class of 1901 group photograph on permanent display in the Alumni House reception room.
Birth: March 3, 1877, Elmira, New York
Death: July 17, 1945, Diamond Point, New York
Education:
At New York Medical College:
Edwin Brown Jenks, M.D., a member of the Class of 1901 at New York Medical College, was the founder of the Diamond Point Emergency Medical Service, the first rural emergency medical service in New York State.1
Dr. Jenks was born in 1877 in Elmira, New York, where his father Robert B. Jenks, M.D., a member of the Class of 1868 at New York Medical College, was a general practitioner. He received a bachelor's degree from Cornell in 1898. The following autumn he entered New York Medical College as a second-year M.D. student.2 He received his M.D. in 1901. After completing an internship at the Flower Hospital, Dr. Jenks practiced briefly in Manhattan before settling in Yonkers, New York, where he practiced medicine for the next three decades. He served a term as Vice President of the Yonkers Hospital Commission and was a longtime board member of the Yonkers Municipal Tuberculosis Commission. During the First World War, Dr. Jenks was a member of the National Guard and organized the Yonkers air defense battery under the auspices of the Veterans Corps of Artillery. He also served on the faculty of New York Medical College during this period as a part-time instructor in the Department of Physiology.
Dr. Jenks was a longtime summer resident of Diamond Point, a lakefront community on Lake George in Warren County, New York. By the mid-1930s, Dr. Jenks had left Yonkers and settled year-round in Diamond Point. He established a rural general practice and held a number of local leadership positions, including vice president of the Warren County Medical Society, co-chairman of the Lake George sanitation committee, and physician to the Lake George Union Free School.
When the United States entered the Second World War at the end of 1941, Dr. Jenks was appointed Emergency Medical Officer of the local Civilian Defense Council. As he prepared his rural community for the war effort, Dr. Jenks realized that its already limited supply of health care providers would soon become even smaller as younger M.D.s from the area were drafted into the United States military. In January 1942, Dr. Jenks responded to this challenge by organizing the Diamond Point Emergency Medical Service. He served as the unit's medical director, helped purchase its first ambulance, and trained its volunteer first responders in advanced first aid. By the time of its first anniversary in January 1943, the Diamond Point ambulance service had come to serve not just Diamond Point but the other communities on the western shore of Lake George as well.3 As a result, two additional emergency medical services under Dr. Jenks's direction were established in the neighboring communities of Lake George and Bolton Landing.
The units were so successful, including treating injured people during a railroad crash in nearby North Creek, that it was recommended that they continue even after the end of the war as a community service. In the summer of 1944, a profile in the nationally distributed Farm Journal established Warren County's volunteer emergency services as a nationwide model program in rural health.4
Throughout this activity, Dr. Jenks kept up a busy private practice as the local physician for his community. When he passed away suddenly on July 17, 1945, a few weeks before the final end of the Second World War, it was widely thought that his heart attack had been brought on by the strain of overwork on behalf of his community. In a tribute to Dr. Jenks, the editors of the Glens Falls Post-Star wrote that the country doctor played an important role in his community:"More than almost any other man he knows its needs and if sufficiently inspired, tries to fill them. Dr. Jenks was inspired."5
Dr. Jenks's memory was honored in 1946 when a new ambulance, purchased to replace the one he had donated in 1942, was named the Dr. Edwin Brown Jenks Memorial Ambulance. This ambulance's successor was likewise named in his memory in 1954.6 The emergency medical services he founded in his community still exist today.
1. "Dr. Maslon to Address Medical Unit; Diamond Point Service to Mark Third Year at Celebration Tonight." Glens Falls Post-Star, January 26, 1945, p. 5; "Dr. Jenks, Pioneer," Glens Falls Post-Star, May 20, 1954 p. 4.
2. Chironian vol. 15 no. 1 (October 1898) p. 18.
3. "Dr. Jenks Leads First Aid Post Another Year; Diamond Point Ambulance Unit Makes Record of Community Service." Glens Falls Post-Star, January 28, 1943, p. 14.
4. "Major Farrell Addresses Emergency Medical Units." Glens Falls Post-Star, May 25, 1944, p. 2; "Dr. Maslon to Address Medical Unit; Diamond Point Service to Mark Third Year at Celebration Tonight." Glens Falls Post-Star, January 26, 1945, p. 5.
5. "Dr. Edwin B. Jenks." Glens Falls Post-Star, July 19, 1945, p. 4.
6. "Group Inspects New Bolton Ambulance." Glens Falls Post-Star, May 20, 1954, p. 15.
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