Category: Medical Heritage Library

James Jackson’s Memoir of James Jackson, Jr.

By , January 16, 2019
First page of James Jackson's 1835 biography of his son, James Jackson, Jr.

First page of James Jackson’s 1835 biography of his son, James Jackson, Jr.

Center staff are currently working on a new finding aid for the James Jackson papers; Jackson was born October 3, 1777 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, to Jonathan Jackson (1743-1810) and Hannah Tracy Jackson. Before beginning his medical career, he worked as a clerk for his father who continued to work in the state government after he had been a representative of Massachusetts at the Continental Congress. Jackson taught school at Leicester Academy for a year in 1797. He received all of his degrees from Harvard University: his A.B in 1796 and M.D. in 1809. After establishing his own general practice, and while working at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Jackson was named the first professor of clinical medicine at Harvard Medical School. He was Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic (1812-1836) and dean of the Medical School (1820-1821).

After earning his A.B. from Harvard in 1796, James Jackson first studied medicine in Salem under physician Edward Augustus Holyoke (1728-1829). Before completing his M.D., he moved to London and took a job as a surgeon’s dresser at St. Thomas’s Hospital; during his time in
London, Jackson paid particular attention to the emerging practice of vaccination. Jackson returned to Boston in 1800 and opened his own medical practice, which he continued until 1866. He developed expertise in vaccination and became one of the earliest people in America
to investigate the practice experimentally. In 1802, before finishing medical school, he was appointed physician to the Boston Dispensary. In 1803, he became a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society, and in 1810 he helped to reorganize the Massachusetts Medical Society and to relocate Harvard Medical School from Cambridge to Boston. In 1810, Jackson began the process of founding Massachusetts General Hospital and Somerville Asylum with John Collins Warren. Jackson was the first physician of Massachusetts General Hospital and practiced there from 1817-1837.

Jackson had an extensive publishing career and Center staff were pleased to find that many of his titles had been digitized and were freely available in the Medical Heritage Library, including Jackson’s 1835 memoir of his son, A memoir of James Jackson, Jr., M.D. : with extracts from his letters to his father, and medical cases collected by him. James Jackson, Jr. had been studying medicine in Paris and returned to Boston to enter medical practice with his fater. Unfortunately, Jackson fell ill almost immediately upon his return to the United States and died before he could open his practice.

The memoir includes extracts from Jackson, Jr.’s letters home from Europe as well as lengthy “footnotes” added by Jackson and case notes from Jackson, Jr.’s study. The “footnotes” are almost conversational in nature, opening with something like an open letter to Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, his son’s teacher in France, about why Jackson, Jr. had not taken some health advice Louis had given him.

MHL digital highlight: Lewis Sayre’s treatment of spinal curvatures

By , November 8, 2011

(above) One of a series of triptychs from Lewis A. Sayre's "Spinal disease and spinal curvature: their treatment by suspension and the use of the plaster of Paris bandage." (London: Smith & Elder, 1877)

Lewis A. Sayre (1820-1900), was a surgeon of significant renown and an important figure in the history of orthopedics in America. He was a charter member of several medical societies, including the American Medical Association, and served as its president in 1880. Among the procedures that he pioneered in his private practice was a process during which the patient was suspended, hanging by the arms, in order to stretch the spine and relieve stresses caused by an irregular curvature, while a plaster of Paris “jacket” was fitted in order to hold the spine in place after suspension. In this particular book, Sayre details his experiments treating scoliosis and Pott’s disease (spinal tuberculosis) with the plaster jacket. He also includes an extensive series of clinical comparisons between his jacket and the more expensive and cumbersome iron braces that were in use at the time. The case studies, which describe a range of successful outcomes, are richly illustrated with drawings and photographs like the ones above.

Recalling his first use of suspension before the application of the jacket, by which he intended to accomplish nothing more than a temporary alleviation of symptoms until a commercially-available brace could be acquired, Sayre writes:

In November 1874 a little boy, four years of age, was brought to me having a sharp posterior curvature of the three last dorsal and the first lumbar vertebrae, together with partial paralysis of the rectum and one leg … I directed one of my assistants to suspend the boy by the arms, in order to see what effect would be produced; and I noticed that, as soon as the body was made pendent, there was more motion in the paralysed limb than before, that the pain was very much relieved, and that the patient was breathing with greater ease. While he was suspended in this manner, I pulled down his shirt and tied it between his legs, thus making it fit the body closely and smoothly; and then, commencing at the pelvis, I applied rollers saturated with plaster of Paris around the entire trunk. At first I was anxious concerning the effect that would be produced on the respiration, but inasmuch as the boy cried lustily, all my fears in that respect were quickly dispelled: so I went on, reversing the bandage, bringing it back to the pelvis, again carrying it upwards, &c., until the body was completely encircled by four or five thicknesses of the roller. The child was then laid with his face downwards on a sofa, and was instructed to remain there until the plaster had become firmly set. When I returned shortly afterwards, I found, to my surprise, that the little fellow had got up from the sofa and walked across the room to a window … When this dressing had been completed, I requested the parents to bring back the child after an interval of ten days, when I proposed to apply and adjust a Taylor’s brace. The above-described plaster jacket had been put on simply for the purpose of rendering the child comfortable whilst being carried home. I did not see either the child or its parents until the following February.

This book is just one of over 70 titles dealing with spinal diseases and abnormalities, from the 18th- through 20th-centuries, that have already been added to the Medical Heritage Library, including one of Pott’s original works on spinal tuberculosis, which the Countway digitized in March of 2011.

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