Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [61]
Jackson was a doctor who practised medicine with delicate attention to the patient, eliciting facts without intrusive questions. Everything about him suggests how suitable he was for Emily Dickinson. His looks were grim, reassuringly like her father - not one to overdo a bedside manner. At this time she had lost confidence in the local Amherst man, Dr Brewster, and in Dr Wesselhöft, a Boston homeopath urged on her by Aunt Lavinia.
It was Dr Jackson’s practice to converse with the patient for a whole hour without taking notes, so as not to deflect attention from every nuance of the patient’s history. He welcomed subjective details; it was his way never to fault the patient even in tone of voice. Alert to character and to the effect of the mind on the body, he treated each case as individual. Following no formula, his habit was to listen and then to communicate ‘principles rather than rules’. After discussing at length the patient’s mode of life, he could satisfy an incurable patient without any prescription for a drug. In the case of epilepsy, he told his patient at once not to use any drug to remove it.
His strict adherence to the good of the patient was exceptional, for though Jackson had the curiosity of a scientist he would not try this or that in ignorance of side-effects. Because he was intelligent enough to admit the limitations of medical knowledge, he refused ‘idiot medications’, overdosing and disregard of relief through the natural processes of the body. From his youth he had been impressed by Robert Boyle’s ideas on the healing power of nature and the advantage of a simple regimen of hygiene, outdoor exercise and rest.
He said, ‘I am convinced that all active interference, during the fit, is useless and may be injurious.’ When he faced a patient who had ‘at all times a liability to the epileptic paroxysm’, he put the question to himself: ‘can this liability be removed?’ Sympathetic though he was to the distress of the patient and the family’s need to overcome this ‘dreadful’ liability, the answer had to be no. He warned against experiment. Once the disease had begun, there was no stopping its course. The best practice was to avoid whatever might aggravate or prolong attacks: agitation, fright, fatigue and excitement.
After assessing a case, he would state the truth plainly. He claimed that in no instance had a patient made him regret candour when there was no cure. Where other doctors who treated epilepsy at the time spoke glibly of ‘cures’, Dr Jackson had more sense. He preferred to speak positively about devising a mode of existence that would mitigate and comfort suffering. In such a situation, he believed, the taste and inclination of the patient should be indulged. Patients left his rooms ready to meet trials bravely. It could have been Dr Jackson who persuaded Emily Dickinson to accept the prospect of seclusion and singleness in the hope of doing something with the intellectual and creative gifts that this doctor had the capacity to discern. Here was just the person to help this young woman devise the way of life to which she adapted with such extraordinary results.
Dr Jackson’s authority would have weighed with Mr Dickinson, who agreed to relieve his daughter of the household tasks and empty social gatherings she loathed. Instead, he indulged the priority she wished to give to poetry and promoted mild exertion in the fresh air: daily walks with her dog Carlo (named after St John Rivers’s dog in Jane Eyre) and her taste for gardening. For her sake Mr Dickinson