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Charles Thomas Jackson:“The Head Behind the Hands”: Applying Science to Implement Discovery and Invention in Early Nineteenth Century America

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Charles Thomas Jackson:“The Head Behind the Hands”: Applying Science to Implement Discovery and Invention in Early Nineteenth Century America Book Reviews 429 RICHARD J. WOLFE and RICHARD PATTERSON. Charles Thomas Jackson: “The Head behind the Hands”: Applying Science to Implement Discovery and Invention in Early Nineteenth Century America. Novato, California, HistoryOfScience.com, 2007.x,417 pp., illus. $35.00. Reviewed by A. J. WRIGHT, M.L.S., Department of Anesthesiology Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jhmas/article/65/3/429/882319 by guest on 30 September 2021 Library, University of Alabama at Birmingham. With this book Wolfe completes a trio of works devoted to the major American figures in the “discovery” of anesthesia in the 1840s: the den- tists Horace Wells and William T. G. Morton, and physician, geologist, and chemist Charles T. Jackson. Wolfe dismisses any claims on behalf of Crawford Long in Georgia or William E. Clarke in Rochester, New York; “they were mere side shows to the main event that took place in New England” (5). In I Awaken to Glory: Essays Celebrating Horace Wells (Boston, Massachusetts: Boston Medical Library and the Historical Museum of Medicine and Dentistry, Hartford, 1994), Wolfe and his co-authors made the case for Wells as the “discoverer” of anesthesia. A second work, Tarnished Idol (San Anselmo, California: Norman Publishing, 2001), devoted more than 600 pages to a detailed account of the discovery controversy, Morton’s checkered business background, and his apparent willingness to use any unscrupulous means to achieve his goal of making money. The work under review completes this story by attempting to rescue Jackson from the mischaracterizations that have sur- rounded him since his death in 1880. Here he is helped by Patterson, a physician who has done extensive research on Jackson and his supposed insanity. The debate over who deserved credit for the discovery of anesthesia began almost immediately after Morton’s October 1846 demonstration of ether inhalation during a surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Wells died young in 1848. As examined in Tarnished Idol, Jackson and Morton at first collaborated on the effort to find an agent that would provide pain relief, with Jackson providing the clues Morton needed. The men soon parted ways and spent the next two decades fighting bitterly before Congress and in the court of public opinion as each man attempted to seize credit for the discovery. Witnesses for all three men testified at hearings, and pamphlets, articles and books issued from many pens. Morton died in 1868; Jackson was hospitalized in 1873 in an insane asylum and died there. Wolfe and Patterson document at length the story developed in many sources since that time in which Morton has been depicted as the hero and Jackson as someone trying to seize credit for something he did not do—and who died insane. 430 Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. 65, July 2010 The book’s first substantial chapter is “Reappraising the Myth of Jackson’s Insanity” and summarizes the research by Wolfe and Patterson to establish “how this misconception of Jackson’s mental state arose and over time became enlarged and distorted, repeated and repeated” (10). Primary author Wolfe examined contemporary and secondary accounts of Jackson’s life down to the present day to establish just how the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jhmas/article/65/3/429/882319 by guest on 30 September 2021 characterization of Jackson’s mental state after 1873 became “insanity.” The authors here expose a shameful record of repetition without orig- inal research by numerous anesthesia “historians.” Patterson has pre- viously published an article on Jackson’s illness that concludes he probably had a stroke followed by aphasia. Jackson’s family had him admitted to the McLean Hospital because that is where he could receive ongoing care. In the next chapter, the authors examine and offer correctives related to other charges against Jackson, that of alcoholism, and the nature of his participation in a mining survey in Michigan from 1847 to 1850. Then the authors devote a chapter to Jackson’s “Early Scientific and Medical Training and His Abandonment of Medicine for a Career in Science.” Here we learn the depth of training Jackson received at Harvard from such luminaries of the age as physician Walter Channing and chemist John White Webster. Jackson graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1829.By1836, Jackson had opened a private chemistry laboratory in Boston, and the authors show how subsequent scholarship on the history of science in New England has recognized Jackson as “one of the most talented scientists of his period” (42). The bulk of the book, the next six chapters or well over 100 pages, is devoted to another controversy in which Jackson was embroiled for many years—his role in the development of the electromagnetic telegraph for which Samuel Morse has received the credit. In 1832, Jackson was return- ing from several years of additional medical training in Europe when he met Samuel Morse, a painter aboard the same ship who had also been spending time in Europe. The two men had many conversations about the possibilities of a telegraph. By 1840, Morse had received a patent and in 1843 secured funding from Congress for an experimental cable; the first successful message was sent the following year. The conflict between the two men had begun in 1837 when Jackson wrote to Morse asking that he be given some of the credit for the dis- covery. Morse’s anger over that request and Jackson’s continued insistence on partial credit eventually resulted in extensive depositions by Jackson in various legal proceedings from 1848 to 1851. Wolfe devotes considerable space to his examination of the primary and secondary literature of this controversy, including those court proceedings unexamined since they Book Reviews 431 first occurred. Two of the depositions are included as an extensive appen- dix in this book. The authors conclude that in this controversy, like those surrounding the ether discovery and the Michigan survey, Jackson’s true role has been dismissed because of his supposed “insanity,” and sub- sequent authors have simply repeated the spurious arguments of the pre- vious ones. A final chapter discusses the authors’ research into the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jhmas/article/65/3/429/882319 by guest on 30 September 2021 possibility that an unsigned portrait of Jackson in the Reynolds Historical Library on the University of Alabama at Birmingham campus was painted by Morse. Readers of this book should not expect a conventional biography. Wolfe and Patterson are attempting to rescue Jackson’s roles in various his- torical controversies. Jackson’s life outside those relevant areas is discussed little or not at all. Jackson certainly deserves a traditional scholarly biogra- phy. In the meantime, Tarnished Idol and this book will give partisans of Long, Morton, and Morse and future anesthesia historians much to con- sider. Wolfe and Patterson have spent years reviewing primary and sec- ondary literature related to Jackson and the controversies and have uncovered much new material. The book’s pro-Jackson arguments may not be totally convincing to many, but it is certainly eye-opening in both its effort to rehabilitate Jackson’s reputation and its outline of how that reputation sank so low. doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrq022 Advance Access Publication on April 12, 2010 M. ANNE CROWTHER and MARGUERITE W. D UPREE. Medical Lives in the Age of Surgical Revolution. Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2007. xvi, 425 pp., illus. $145. Reviewed by ROBERT R. NESBIT, Jr., M.D., Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, Georgia 30912. Medical Lives in the Age of Surgical Revolution is the forty-third volume in the Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time series. Utilizing extensive databases and “a team of students,” Crowther and Dupree follow a cohort of medical students—approximately one thousand each from the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh—who began their studies during the years 1866 to 1874. The time period was intentionally chosen to reflect the period after the passage of the British Medical Act of 1858 which brought about improved standards in the education and requirements for registration of British physicians. The years selected were of particular note because most of this group of students came under the influence of Joseph Lister, Professor of Surgery at the University of.
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