Jones spent most of his career in Boston. At the Boston hospital named the
House of the Good Samaritan, he was the chief resident physician from 1928 to 1929 and from 1929 to 1947 the founding director of the research department for investigation of rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease. At Massachusetts General Hospital from 1929 to 1947 he was also a member of the medical staff and, under the supervision of Paul Dudley White, initiated and developed the rheumatic fever clinic.[6][8] At
Harvard Medical School, Jones joined the teaching staff in 1928 and was promoted to assistant professor in 1941.[6] In 1947 he resigned his assistant professorship and moved to New York City, but continued as a lecturer at Harvard Medical School.[6] In New York City from 1947 until his final illness and death in 1954 in Petersburg, Virginia, he was the director of the
Helen Hay Whitney Foundation.[8]
The 1936 and 1952 papers on the natural history of rheumatic fever, written by Edward Franklin Bland and T. Duckett Jones, are considered classics.[9]
In his honor, the American Heart Association established the annual T. Duckett Jones Memorial Lecture. The first lecture Rheumatism — Then and Now was presented by Paul Dudley White in 1962.[11]
Family
T. Duckett Jones had three brothers and four sisters. One of his brothers, Herbert Claiborne Jones (1897–1975), became a surgeon who served in the Pacific Theater in World War II. Their father was Dr. J. Bolling Jones (1871–1950), who served as president of the Virginia Medical Society. Of Bolling Jones's four daughters, one became a physician in Florida and two others married physicians.[8]
Jones, T. Duckett; Mote, John R. (1934). "The Phases of Foreign Protein Sensitization in Human Beings". New England Journal of Medicine. 210 (3): 120–123.
doi:
10.1056/NEJM193401182100302.
Bland EF; Jones TD (1952). "The Natural History of Rheumatic Fever: A 20 Year Perspective". Annals of Internal Medicine. 37 (5): 1006–1026.
doi:
10.7326/0003-4819-37-5-1006.
PMID12986608.