where they learned many things that were valuable, and many that were curious; but as they grew older and began to think more of their ability to help the sick than their power of talking about phenomena, they began to look back to the teaching of Dr. Jackson, as he, after his London experience, looked back to that of Dr. Holyoke.  And so it came to be at last that the bare mention of his name in any of our medical assemblies would call forth such a tribute of affectionate regard as is only yielded to age when it brings with it the record of a life spent in well doing.

No accident ever carries a man to eminence such as his in the medical profession.  He who looks for it must want it earnestly and work for it vigorously; Nature must have qualified him in many ways, and education must have equipped him with various knowledge, or his reputation will evaporate before it reaches the noon-day blaze of fame.  How did Dr. Jackson gain the position which all conceded to him?  In the answer to this question some among you may find a key that shall unlock the gate opening on that fair field of the future of which all dream but which not all will ever reach.

First of all, he truly loved his profession.  He had no intellectual ambitions outside of it, literary, scientific or political.  To him it was occupation enough to apply at the bedside the best of all that he knew for the good of his patient; to protect the community against the inroads of pestilence; to teach the young all that he himself had been taught, with all that his own experience had added; to leave on record some of the most important results of his long observation.

With his patients he was so perfect at all points that it is hard to overpraise him.  I have seen many noted British and French 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.