8 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



their eightieth anniversary ; and the remaining six, Loring, Smyth, 

 Lord, Bopp, and Faraday, had each transcended the limit of three- 

 score and ten years. 



Of the home members whose services we desire to commemorate, we 

 may appropriately begin our record with a notice of the venerable as- 

 sociate and friend whose professional skill and wisdom we have so long 

 ranked among our social blessings, and whose gentle benignity wins us 

 even now as if he were still among us. 



Dr. James Jackson, for many years an eminent physician and the 

 acknowledged head of the medical profession in Boston, has died during 

 the last year at the advanced age of nearly ninety years. He was 

 born in Newburyport in 1777, and was graduated at Harvard College 

 in 1796. He was one of the chief founders of the Massachusetts 

 General Hospital, and was the first and for a number of years the only 

 physician of this institution. His clinical lectures in the hospital 

 were continued for many years in connection with his other duties in 

 the medical school as Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medi- 

 cine in Harvard University. He was for seven years President of the 

 Massachusetts Medical Society, and on the decease of Dr. Bowditch 

 he was elected President of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in 

 1838, which office he accepted with the condition that he should retire 

 from it on the following year. 



The intellect of Dr. Jackson was capacious, logical, exact, and un- 

 wavering in its loyalty to honesty and truth. His social traits were 

 genial, impulsive, and sanguine. Coming in his early life from the 

 schools of European erudition, he brought with him a deep respect for the 

 labor and learning, the authority and conventional prestige, of the then 

 accepted luminaries of medical science. His methods of practice 

 were in a high degree energetic and decisive. He believed, in common 

 with many others of that day, that most diseases were susceptible of 

 control, if not of removal, by the modes of artificial interference then 

 generally in use. These opinions and habits were greatly modified, if 

 not subdued, in the latter half of his long and observing life, so that 

 although he never lost his professional fondness for the forms and 

 implements of his art, and sometimes carried their use to a scrupulous 

 degree of exactness, yet he became more tolerant of nature, more 

 humble in his expectations from art, and more distrustful of reckless 

 interference, whenever certain harm was to be balanced against doubt- 

 ful good. 



