Memoir of James Jackson, Jr., M.D.
With extracts from his letters to his father, and medical cases collected by him. By James Jackson, M.D. Boston: I.R. Butts, 1835. (4), 444 pp. Original pebbled cloth, light uniform fading, unobtrusive one inch band of tape residue at top of spine, contents fine, withal a very good copy. Inscribed presentation to "H. A. Buttolph, M.D. / from D.L. Dix," written in ink in Dorothea Dix's hand on front free endpaper, with her earlier ownership signature on title page.
First edition. A fine association copy of this account of a most promising young American physician who died of tuberculosis at age 24. Written by his father, a distinguished American physician largely responsible for the founding of the Massachusetts General Hospital. This copy originally belonging to Dorothea Dix. Her signature is on the title and there may have been a presentation to her on a fly leaf which was sometime removed, perhaps when she inscribed this volume to Dr. Horace A. Buttolph (1815-1896) conceivably at the time of his appointment in 1847 as first superintendent of the newly constructed New Jersey Lunatic Asylum at Trenton.
Founded by Dorothea Dix, the Trenton asylum was the first of New Jersey's public mental hospitals, and the "firstbom child," as Dorothea Dix lovingly called it, of her unparalleled effort to bring about a new era in the treatment of the insane. Dix spent her last years at the hospital and died there in 1887. Buttolph served as its superintendent from 1847 to 1876, having earlier apprenticed at Utica under Dr. Amariah Brigham. Buttolph, who later received an honorary degree from Princeton (1872), would have been 32 years old at the time of his appointment, eight years older than James Jackson, Jr. at time of his premature death.
Jackson represented the promise—tragically cut short but so well documented in this "poignant volume (which) drew wide attention from American physicians" (ANB)—of a new generation of American physicians. Perhaps this gift was a token of Dix's esteem for Buttolph, both as caretaker of her "firstborn" and, like James Jackson, Jr., a young American physician also of great promise. A second edition (228 pp.) with an added memoir, was published by Hilliard & Gray in 1836.
Print Inquire
