Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/624

JACKSON, has left this out of a number of tributes:



Jackson, James (1810–1834)

James Jackson Junior had a short life, dying when only twenty-four years old, but he left behind him an essay on pneumonia that gained the Boylston Prize at Harvard, an account of the cholera epidemic in Paris in 1832, and he first called attention to the prolonged expiratory sound as an important diagnostic sign in incipient phthisis.

The son of the eminent (q. v.) and his wife, Elizabeth Cabot Jackson, he was born in Boston, January 1, 1810, and graduated at Harvard in 1828. He began the study of medicine under the direction of his father and attended the lectures at the Harvard Medical School until April, 1831, when he went to Paris and became a pupil and friend of Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis. There he worked at La Pitié, except for a six months' visit to Great Britain and Ireland, until July, 1833. Reaching home, he graduated M. D. from Harvard in 1834, but died of pericarditis a month after graduation, March 27 of that year.

Louis wrote that he thought him a most careful observer and the notes and papers Jackson left behind him attest this judgment.

His father published a memoir of his son in 1835 of 444 pages, reporting his medical cases and printing extracts from his letters.

While in Paris young Jackson was instrumental in founding the Société Médicale d'observation de Paris. To this society he communicated, in 1833, his paper on the prolonged expiratory sound in early phthisis. "Notes on Sixty Cases of Cholera" was published by his father in 1834.

Jackson, John Barnard Swett (1806–1879)

The medical career of this pioneer pathologist is of especial interest, as he studied in Paris at a time when modern medicine was just making its entry into the scientific world. The old theories of humors was giving place to the exact description of disease, based on pathologic anatomy, while by physical examination men were attempting to define, during life, the abnormal condition which was the cause of the disease under investigation. Jackson returned to Boston in 1831 and from the first devoted himself to pathology. His general practice was always limited and after 1850 he seldom saw patients except in consultation. His life was spent in the pathologic laboratory and the medical museum of the Harvard Medical School. His chief interest lay in the close study and exact description of the gross pathologic anatomy of diseased organs, not in the microscopic study of disease. The modern microscope was unknown to him, and he died before bacteriology made known to the world the etiology of most acute and many chronic diseases.

Dr. Jackson was born in Boston, June 5, 1806, being the fourth and youngest child of Henry and Hannah Swett Jackson. He was the grandson of Jonathan Jackson of Newburyport, Massachusetts, "an honored member of the Continental Congress who held several offices under Washington," of whom a contemporary wrote, "He was the beau ideal of a gentleman who retained the supremacy among that galaxy of worthies which formed the intellectual and social life of Newburyport." His uncle, (q. v.), the noted physician, had great influence over his life in a social, personal and medical way, as his father, a sea captain, died the year of his birth.

John was educated at private schools, entered Harvard College in 1821 and was graduated in 1825, among his classmates being Charles Francis Adams, Admiral Davis, the Rev. Dr. Hedge, S. K. Lothrop and the librarian, John Langdon Sibley. Dr. Jackson went abroad in 1829 in a sailing vessel, reaching Havre after a tempestuous voyage of fifty-six days. At first he devoted himself to surgery, studying with Dupuytren, Roux and Lisfranc. After a winter in Paris he spent some time in Edinburgh, where he studied with Mr. Syme. In London he first turned his attention especially to medicine and pathology, working under Bright, Addison and Hodgkin. He sailed for home June 4, 1831, as surgeon of a packet of 350 tons, reaching New