346 JOHN BARNARD SWETT JACKSON. 



son was the centre and the life, in a far truer sense than Louis XIV. 

 was the throne. Never absent; almost invariably contributing some 

 new fact, some valuable specimen; full of enthusiasm in his description 

 of those fractions of diseased organs, the changes of which he studied 

 with the greatest nicety before he attempted to display and describe 

 them; saving carefully whatever was worth saving; not wasting him- 

 self in hoarding duplicates of common lesions which every week of a 

 city's practice can furnish, — the Society soon found that under the 

 hands of one man, unpaid except with the empty title of Curator, a 

 choice Museum was growing month by month and year after year into 

 completeness. For more than forty years Dr. Jackson was Curator of 

 this Museum, now known as the Jackson Cabinet, and by a vote of the 

 Society to be transferred to the Medical Department of Harvard Uni- 

 versity whenever a new building shall be ready to give it safe and 

 fitting accommodation. For a great many years it has been a central 

 point of attraction to all our medical visitors. Dr. Jackson never 

 appeared to greater advantage than in 'going through this admirable 

 collection with an intelligent professional brother from some other 

 town or country. He knew his specimens as a father knows his 

 children. He was not one of those collectors who gratify their acquis- 

 itiveness in picking up every thing they can which others want, and 

 their vanity by showing what they hope nobody else possesses. It 

 was what a preparation taught or illustrated which rendered it valu- 

 able in his eyes. The value of the two collections which he in large 

 measure built up, and thoroughly arranged and described, consisted 

 very much in the histories of the cases of which they were the material 

 records, and which he took the greatest pains to have and to set down 

 in his catalogues. Under many circumstances, he was rather slow 

 and labored in speech than happy as an orator, but, with one of his 

 choice specimens in his hand and an interested listener, he became 

 warmed and inspired with an eloquence all his own. This character- 

 istic never left him. I remember when he came back not many months 

 ago from Washington, bringing with him photographs of certain crania 

 he had there seen and studied, with what boy-like ardor he, now past 

 the period at which the fiery and impassioned king of Israel "gat no 

 heat," expatiated on the disappearance of the nasal bones, their jjlace 

 being supplied by the meeting of the ascending portions of the superior 

 maxillary. This was only one instance of his inextinguishable youth- 

 fulness of excitability. In 1847, he published a descriptive catalogue 

 of the Museum of the Society for Medical Improvement, in a well- 

 filled octavo volume of three hundred and fifty pages. It was of this 



