Physician/chemist/geologist Charles Thomas Jackson's life of conflict and controversy

Abstract

After a brief medical career, Charles Thomas Jackson (1805–1880) began work as a consulting chemist and geologist in Boston. He served as State Geologist in Maine, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire from 1837 to 1844, and completed geologica l surveys of those States. In 1847, he was appointed United States Geologist to undertake a survey of the public lands of the Lake Superior region of Michigan. This survey was beset by strife, and Jackson was forced to resign in 1849. But he was already embroiled in the even larger “ether controversy,” which pitted Jackson against his former student, Boston dentist William T.G. Morton, each of whom claimed to be the discoverer of ether anaesthesia. The confrontation was prolonged, dramatic, and the focus of a 1944 Hollywood motion picture. In the end, Morton emerged the apparent victor, but the personal toll on both men was severe. Jackson was committed to a Massachusetts insane asylum in 1873 and died there seven years later. Despite a personality that his modern biographers have described as “irritable,” “eccentric,” and “paranoid,” Jackson made significant contributions to the early science of geology in the United States.