Jefferson Medical College - Clinic Yearbook (Philadelphia, PA)

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Informal Remarks of Dr. Chevalier Jackson in Accepting the Bok Award, February 9, 1927 ITHOUT for one moment presuming to question the judgment of the Board of Trustees, I cannot rid my mind of the thought that if they hadpknown as much about the recipient of this medal as I know, the Award would have gone to someone else. Protesting somewhat, I neverthless accept the good things that come my way. Benefitting a community, as such, has never been a direct major object in my activities. Accepting the Board's decision that I have done so, I must confess that it is a clear case of hitting a target hidden behind the one at which aim was taken. Awards, even to children in schools, are usually based upon effort. Now strange to say, my efforts have never been in the direction of civics. When I came to Philadelphia, ten years ago, I had no more thought of conferring a benefit on this community than I had of benefitting Pittsburgh when, sixty-one years ago I arrived there, weighing eight pounds, and yelling to the utmost of my infantile ability. Mr. Bok has called attention to the un- questionable fact that Americans fall short in thoroughness. I wish to call attention to the testimony of my Knickerbocker grandmother, who was present, that I did that initial yelling thoroughly, which is all that could be expected of an American citizen of that age. Dear old Knickerbocker grandmother! I wish she could be here tonight. She, at least, would agree with the Board of Trustees. Another who would agree with the Board, would be my French grandfather. In 1805, a boy of ten years, in the port of Bordeaux, France, he was bound in apprenticeship to a Yankee shipper, Captain Fairbanks of the Kitty Clyde. The papers required that the boy should be brought back to his mother within four years. He remembered his mother kissed him good-bye, he never saw her again, Captain Fairbanks went ashore, retired, at Dedham, Massachusetts, and bound out the boy, jean Morange, as an apprentice in a machine shop. Here my grandfather developed a marvelous degree of mechanical ingenuity. A few years later a call came from Pittsburgh for an expert mechanic. They had invented nail making machines but they could not make them make nails. My grandfather perfected the machines, and the old hand-forged nail went out of general use never to return. To this grandfather I owe an inheritance of mechanical ingenuity, but Page Eigbly-eight

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value in after life. Be honest in your work and in all your inquiries. Pursue your studies in the way your conscience can name, honest. Be attentive and diligent to what your teachers tell you, for they are profoundly interested in trying to teach you in the right way in so far as they are able to understand it. A dishonest student cannot accomplish anything that is real. He cannot study with real effect. Therefore, try earnestly to reflect credit upon yourself and to your Alma Mater. It is within the power of every one. To preserve intact this heritage, with which I have tried to impress you, requires the close co-operation and teamwork of every graduate and under- graduate of this school. Let these walls resound and from every part of the universe where a jefferson man may be found, echo the sentiment expressed in this wartime verse: It is not the guns or armament Or the money they can pay, It's the close co-operation That makes them win the.day. It is not the individual l Or the army as a whole, But the everlasting teamwork Of every blooming soul. Page Eigbly-Jeven

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if only I could have nad him to work beside me in my experimental shop, what wonders we could have accomplished together! To him I owe another thing, As a cabin boy Captain Fairbanks gave him the key to the locker where the liquor was kept, because he did not drink. That worthiness of trust because of abstinence. from liquor sank ineradicably into my youthful mind, and fired me with an ambition for trustworthiness. In after life, hundreds of times, yes thousands of times, when a mother has laid her child on the operating table in absolute trust in me, it has been a great consolation to me to feel that what- ever else I might lack, I could at least command the clear eye and the steady hand that total abstinence can give. Another who would agree with the Board of trustees, if she were here, would be my Mother. No one will ever know the sacrifices she made for me. To her fondness for Medical Science I owe an incentive that has never wavered. Still another would have been my father, long since dead. To his oft-repeated advice, Educate the eye and the fingers I owe the manual training that has been an essential. To his advice: Educate the 'lame duck,' I owe such degree of ambidexterity as I possess. News of this award has come upon me so suddenly that I have not had time to analyze the matter sufficiently to tell you just how it happened. I have given you the hereditary background. It seems to me, however, that what little I have been able to accomplish affords one more example of the cardinal truth enunciated by Mr. Bok, about Thoroughness as a factor in success. Possibly I inherited my thoroughness from my Knickerbocker grandmother. As I did that initial yelling thoroughly, just so I have since done everything as thoroughly as I could do it. As with Mr. Bok, himself, merely good enough was never good enough for meg though I had never formulated the thought as he has formulated it, in his forceful way. Throughout my whole adult life, every' moment of my time, every spark of energy that I could command, or commandeer, has been devoted to saving chil- dren whose lives were imperiled in such a peculiar way that to save them re- quired the recognition and solution of an interminable succession of new and difficult problems. It so happened that by heredity and unknowingly, by early training, I was to an unusual degree, equipped for devising means for the safe solution of these life-saving problems. No high order of intellect was required, the problems were fundamentally mechanical. What was needed above all things was painstaking thoroughness in the working out of innumerable, minute, mechanical details. It has taken twenty-two years to master the safety-ping and I am so constituted that I am not yet satisfied that the mastery is complete. Physicians realize, as an abstract truth, that it is perfectly natural to die. Page Eigbly-nine