ench and American
practitioners, but I never saw the man so altogether admirable at the
bedside of the sick as Dr. James Jackson. His smile was itself a remedy
better than the potable gold and the dissolved pearls that comforted the
praecordia of mediaeval monarchs. Did a patient, alarmed without cause,
need encouragement, it carried the sunshine of hope into his heart and
put all his whims to flight, as David's harp cleared the haunted chamber
of the sullen king. Had the hour come, not for encouragement, but for
sympathy, his face, his voice, his manner all showed it, because his
heart felt it. So gentle was he, so thoughtful, so calm, so absorbed in
the case before him, not to turn round and look for a tribute to his
sagacity, not to bolster himself in a favorite theory, but to find out
all he could, and to weigh gravely and cautiously all that he found, that
to follow him in his morning visit was not only to take a lesson in the
healing art, it was learning how to learn, how to move, how to look, how
to feel, if that can be learned. To visit with Dr. Jackson was a medical
education.

He was very firm, with all his kindness. He would have the truth about
his patients. The nurses found it out; and the shrewder ones never
ventured to tell him anything but a straight story. A clinical dialogue
between Dr. Jackson and Miss Rebecca Taylor, sometime nurse in the
Massachusetts General Hospital, a mistress in her calling, was as good
questioning and answering as one would be like to hear outside of the
court-room.

Of his practice you can form an opinion from his book called "Letters to
a Young Physician." Like all sensible men from the days of Hippocrates
to the present, he knew that diet and regimen were more important than
any drug or than all drugs put together. Witness his treatment of
phthisis and of epilepsy. He retained, however, more confidence in some
remedial agents than most of the younger generation would concede to
them. Yet his materia medica was a simple one.

"When I first went to live with Dr. Holyoke," he says, "in 1797, showing
me his shop, he said, 'There seems to you to be a great variety of
medicines here, and that it will take you long to get acquainted with
them, but most of them are unimportant. There are four which are equal
to all the rest, namely, Mercury, Antimony, Bark and Opium.'" And Dr.
Jackson adds, "I can only say of his practice, the longer I have lived, I
have thought better and better