of it." When he thought it necessary to
give medicine, he gave it in earnest. He hated half-practice--giving a
little of this or that, so as to be able to say that one had done
something, in case a consultation was held, or a still more ominous event
occurred. He would give opium, for instance, as boldly as the late Dr.
Fisher of Beverly, but he followed the aphorism of the Father of
Medicine, and kept extreme remedies for extreme cases.

When it came to the "non-naturals," as he would sometimes call them,
after the old physicians,--namely, air, meat and drink, sleep and
watching, motion and rest, the retentions and excretions, and the
affections of the mind,--he was, as I have said, of the school of
sensible practitioners, in distinction from that vast community of
quacks, with or without the diploma, who think the chief end of man is to
support apothecaries, and are never easy until they can get every patient
upon a regular course of something nasty or noxious. Nobody was so
precise in his directions about diet, air, and exercise, as Dr. Jackson.
He had the same dislike to the a peu pres, the about so much, about so
often, about so long, which I afterwards found among the punctilious
adherents of the numerical system at La Pitie.

He used to insist on one small point with a certain philological
precision, namely, the true meaning of the word "cure." He would have it
that to cure a patient was simply to care for him. I refer to it as
showing what his idea was of the relation of the physician to the
patient. It was indeed to care for him, as if his life were bound up in
him, to watch his incomings and outgoings, to stand guard at every avenue
that disease might enter, to leave nothing to chance; not merely to throw
a few pills and powders into one pan of the scales of Fate, while Death
the skeleton was seated in the other, but to lean with his whole weight
on the side of life, and shift the balance in its favor if it lay in
human power to do it. Such devotion as this is only to be looked for in
the man who gives himself wholly up to the business of healing, who
considers Medicine itself a Science, or if not a science, is willing to
follow it as an art,--the noblest of arts, which the gods and demigods of
ancient religions did not disdain to practise and to teach.

The same zeal made him always ready to listen to any new suggestion which
promised to be useful, at a period of life when many men find it hard to
learn ne