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. Of his practice you can form an opinion from his book called “Letters to a Young Physician.” Like all sensible men from the days of Hippocrates to the present, he knew that diet and regimen were more important than any drug or than all drugs put together. Witness his treatment of phthisis and of epilepsy. He retained, however, more confidence in some remedial agents than most of the younger generation would concede to them. Yet his materia medica was a simple one.