Jackson, Charles Thomas

(b.plymouth, Massachusetts, 21 June 1805; d. Somerville, Massachusetts, 28 August 1880)

medicine, chemistry, mineralogy, geology.

Jackson was descended from the original settlers of Plymouth. His sister Lydia (later renamed Lydian) was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s second wife. He had an irritable personality and it is difficult to avoid putting the label of “paranoid” on his behavior. He died insane.

Jackson received his early education in the town school and in the private school of Dr. Allyne of Duxbury. His health failed and he made a walking expedition through New York and New Jersey with Baron Lederer, William McClure, Lesueur, and Troost, who were to foster his interest in natural history and geology. He returned to Boston and Prepared privately for Harvard Medical School. During medical school, he received the Boylston Prize for a dissertation on paruria mellita, and in 1829 he was “authorized to give instruction in chemistry during the absence of Dr. [John White] Webster, and at his expense”, at Harvard College. He was graduated in 1829.

Jackson’s interest in geology began when he found chiastolite crystals in a glacial drift schist in Lancaster, Massachusetts. In 1827 he visited Nova Scotia with his friend, Francis Alger, and he returned again in in the summer of 1829 to geologize. His observations were published in the 1828 American Journal of Science.

In 1829 Jackson went to Europe where he studied medicine at the University of Paris, attended lectures of the École de Médecine, the Collège de France, and the scientific lecturs at the Sorbonne, as well as those on geology given by L. Élie de Beaumont at the École Royale des Mines. He made a walking tour of Europe, and, in Vienna, did 200 autopsies with Dr. John Fergus of Scotland and Dr. Johannes Glaisner of Poland on cholera victims. In Paris he became acquainted with the statistical methods then being introduced into medicine by Pierre Louis and his empirical school. He returned to Boston in 1832.

He abandoned the practice of medicine completely i9n 1836 and established a laboratory in Boston for instruction in analytical chemistry, the first laboratory of its kind in America to receive students.

Jackson was the first state geologist of Maine, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. The movement for geological surveys was on, but when Great Britain claimed 10,000 square miles of Maine, it served to stimulate the legislature of Massachusetts to cooperate with that of Maine in the survey of the public lands owned by the former in the latter’s territory. Three reports were issued (1837, 1838, 1839). In 1839 Jackson was employed to make a geological examination of Rhode Island; the report was published in 1840. In 1839 he was appointed state geologist for New Hampshire and his results were published in a quarto volume in 1844. In 1847 he was appointed U.S. geologist to report on the public lands in the Lake Superior region. After two seasons’ work, conflicts with his fellow geologists J. D. Whitney and J. W. Foster led to his discharge. After Jackson was dismissed as U.S. geologist, there appeared the pamphlet Full Exposure of the Conduct of Charles T. Jackson, Leading to His Discharge From Government Service, and Justice to Messrs. Foster and Whitney (Washington, 1851). Thereafter, he made frequent reports for mining companies.

Jackson was a descriptive geologist who was interested in the economic advantages that might come from his work. He was more interested in mineralogical geology than stratigraphical geology, and he minimized the importance of fossils in determining the ages of rocks. His reliance on mineralogy alone obscured possible correlations of strata. Everywhere, Jackson saw igneous causes. He also considered “the causes formerly in action vastly more energetic than they are now.” He was not interested in the question of chronology and held on to the Wernerian mineralogical school’s terminology, such as “transition” rather than using the terms “Cambrain” and “Silurian” as introduced by Sedgwick and Murchison. In 1843 he stated that “this country presents no proofs of the glacial theory as taught by Agassiz, but on the country the general bearing of the facts is against the theory.” Jackson appears to have been the first to observe the occurrence of tellurium and silenium in America.

In 1836 Jackson claimed discovery of guncotton after it had been announced by C. F. Schönbein. Jackson had returned to America in 1832 on the same ship with Samuel F. B. Morse and some years later claimed to have pointed out to Morse the principles of the electric telegraph which Morse patented in 1840. (For a defense of Morse see A. Kendall, Morse’s patent. Full Exposure of Dr. Charles T. Jackson’s Pretensions to the Invention of the American Electro-Magnetic Telegraph.)

William Thomas Green Morton, who had been a student of Jackson’s demonstrated to a group of students and physicians the use of ether as a general anesthetic on 16 October 1846 at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Morton applied for a patent on 28 October 1846 and, upon the advice of others, Jackson’s name was included as a patentee. The patent was granted (no. 4848) on 12 November 1846, but predictably Jackson claimed the discovery, although he had assumed no responsibility. He addressed two letters to Élie de Beaumont (1 December and 20 December 1846), to be read at the French Academy, and in which, without mentioning Morton, he announced himself as the discoverer of surgical anesthesia. On 2 March 1847, Jackson made a similar announcement at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He spent much time and effort trying to prove his primary role in the discovery of the use of ether as a general anesthetic. In 1873 he was committed to McLean Hospital as insane. He died in 1880. His valid scientific reputation rests upon his geological and mineralogical work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Orginal Works. An incomplete bibliography of Jackson’s writings is to be found in J. B. Woodworth, “Charles Thomas Jackson,” in American Geologist, 20 (Aug. 1897), 87-110.

II. Secondary Literature. There has been no adequate biography of Jackson; the available biographical accounts are William Barber, “Dr. Jackson’s Discovery of Ether,” in National Magazine (Oct. 1896), 46-58; Edward Waldo Emerson, “A History of the Gift of Painless Surgery,” in Atlantic Monthly, 78 , 679-686; Anonymous, “Charles Thomas Jackson,” in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 16 (1881), 430-432; T. T. Bouve, “Biographical Notice of C. T. Jackson,” in proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History, 21 (1881), 40-47; Thomas Edward Keys, The History of Surgical Anesthesia (New York, 1945); Bruce Rogers, The Semi- Centennial of Anaesthesia Oct. 16, 1846-Oct. 16, 1896 (Boston, 1897); L. J. Ludovici, The Discovery of Anaesthesia (New York, 1961); John F. Fulton and Madeline Stanton, An Annotated Catalogue of Books and Pamphlets Bearing on the Early History of Surgical Anaesthesia (New York, 1946); William Henry Welch, A Consideration of the Introduction of Surgical Anesthesia (Boston, 1909); Richard Manning Hodges, A Narrative of Events Connected With the Introduction of Sulphuric Ether Into Surgical Use (Boston, 1891); Thomas Frances Harrington, The Harvard Medical School 1782-1905, II (New York, 1905), 604-635; R. H. Dana, Jr., ed., “Ether Discovery,” in Littell’s Living Age (1848), pp. 529-571; Victor Robinson, Victory Over Pain (New York, 1946).

On the ether controversy, the Boston Athenaeum holds “clippings and correspondence relating to etherization, Dr. W. T. G. Morton and Dr. C. T. Jackson (1848-1861).” There are about twenty letters relating to the ether discovery, including an undated, six-page letter from C. T. Jackson to the U.S. Congress. The Countway Medical Library at Harvard Medical School has the correspondence of Dr. Stanley Cobb (1936-1937) regarding a portrait of Jackson and a memorial tablet to be placed in the Ether Dome at the Massachusetts General Hospital, in order to give Jackson recognition for the discovery of ether. This includes copies of letters (1849-1873) verifying Dr. Jackson’s discovery. The Countway also holds three volumes, “letters, affidavits and other papers relating to the discovery of the use of ether,” deposited in the Boston Medical Library in March 1917 by Mrs. Bridges of Medford, Jackson’s daughter. There are approximately fifteen letters in the Countway. The Houghton Library at Harvard holds about twenty letters, including nine letters to Emerson (1845-1856). The Boston Museum of Science (with holdings of the old Boston Society of Natural History) has three lectures and two letters. The Massachusetts Historical Society has about thirty letters relating to Jackson and the ether controversy. The Concord Public Library and the Boston Public Library each has one. There are also a few letters in the william Sharswood correspondence in the American Philosophical Society and one letter in the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists papers of the Academy of Natural Science in philadelphia. There are 65 items in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.

George Edmund Gifford, Jr.