Jamison, Chaille M. D.

Submitted by Mike Miller

Chaille Jamison, M. D. Since graduating from Tulane in medicine in 1912, Dr. Chaille Jamison has had a service record of exceptional importance in his profession, part of the time as a medical officer in the World war, and also with a busy round of duties as a physician and surgeon in private and institutional practice. His name recalls the memory of one of New Orleans' greatest and most beloved teachers and physicians, the eminent Doctor Chaille, his maternal grandfather.

Doctor Stanford E. Chaille, who died in New Orleans in 1911 at the age of eighty-one, was for twenty-three years dean of the school of medicine of Tulane. In memory of his long and useful career, his professional colleagues created the Chaille Memorial Laboratory of hygiene, now one of the most valuable assets of the medical school. In a characterization of Doctor Chaille personally and professionally, Dr. Rudolph Matas recently said in an address before the Tulane Alumnae: "We recollect an alert, energetic, active soldierly personality, with slightly bowed head, covered usually with a soft broad brimmed hat, an inseparable relic of the style that recalled his attachment to the Lost Cause 0f the Confederacy.

"A quick greeting, with half-controlled smile, endeavoring to hide itself in a brusqueness was at all times a marked mannerism of the man. Dogmatic in teaching fundamental principles, but broadly philosophic in his interpretation of humankind, such was Chaille. His work has touched the basic forces which have made state medicine, medical education and preventive medicine."

"After his retirement, no one could have watched more tenderly or with more concern the waxing innovations of a new regime. His last stand came at the dedication of the home of the Orleans Parish Medical Society, when the 'old war horse,' as he was so lovingly called, showed his mettle in an aggressive appeal to the younger generation to take up their rights in state medicine and to further the precepts that he and his contemporaries had established before the Legislature of 1878."

Doctor Chaille Jamison, grandson of this distinguished man of medicine, was born at New Orleans in 1889. His great-grandfather Jamison was a Scotchman and a Presbyterian minister, coming from Belfast to New York, where he was in the ministry. Samuel Jamison, grandfather of Doctor Jamison, moved from New York to New Orleans in the early part of the nineteenth century. He was a builder and contractor and perfected an organization that constructed the beginnings of the modern city of New Orleans as distinguished from the ancient buildings of the old French regime. Samuel Jamison had a brother, David Jamison, who for many years was one of the prominent merchants of the city, being a member of the firm Levois & Jamison, occupying the building that in later years has been occupied by the Stevens Company. Thus in more ways than one, the Jamisons have been among the builders of the modern city.

Through his mother, Dr. Chaille Jamison is also a descendant of Col. John Monford, a United States army officer, who in the early years of the last century was sent to Louisiana as commandant of Fort Pike and other military posts in the South and Southwest.

Chaille Jamison was educated in the University School at New Orleans, the Virginia Military Institute at Lexington at Tulane University and was graduated Doctor of Medicine from the Tulane University School of Medicine in 1912. From 1910-12 he was an interne at the Charity Hospital, New Orleans, beginning his private practice in the same year. In 1910 appointed student demonstrator of Anatomy at Tulane and in 1912 became teacher and instructor in the laboratories of Clinical Medicine and instructor in Physical Diagnosis. In 1919 became assistant Professor of Medicine at Tulane in April, 1917, he volunteered in the medical corps of the United States Army, received training at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, was commissioned a first lieutenant and going overseas was promoted to captain and later to major. In France he was on duty at base hospital No. 24 at Limoges and spent four months with the Fourth Army Corps on the Argonne and St. Mihiel battle fronts, a portion of this time being in command of a "shock team" of the medical corps. Since the war, Doctor Jamison has continued in the military organization and is now lieutenant colonel in the Medical Reserve Officers Corps.

His high standing in his profession is indicated by some of his active associations. He is senior physician at the Charity Hospital, senior physician at the Mercy Hospital, physician to the Hotel Dieu, is assistant bacteriologist of the City Board of Health and is former president of the Orleans Parish Medical Society. He also belongs to the Louisiana State Medical Society and the American Medical Association.

Doctor Jamison's life is given to teaching at the Medical School of Tulane University and the practice of internal medicine.

A History of Louisiana, (vol. 2), p. 10, by Henry E. Chambers. Published by The American Historical Society, Inc., Chicago and New York, 1925.