Dr. Chevalier Jackson, Pioneer of Bronchoscopy

Before Chevalier Jackson, swallowing a foreign object often meant death by suffocation or surgery. The Pittsburgh-born physician changed that. Working through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jackson pioneered endoscopic techniques for removing objects lodged in the throat, esophagus, or airway, developing specialized instruments he largely designed himself at his home workshop here at Sunrise Mill.

His collection of more than two thousand retrieved objects, now preserved at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, includes buttons, coins, safety pins, and a tiny Napoleon Bonaparte figurine. Jackson also crusaded for warning labels on household chemicals, and his advocacy culminated in the Federal Caustic Poison Act of nineteen twenty-seven, which required that lye and similar products carry danger warnings. He taught at several Philadelphia medical colleges and is considered a founder of modern laryngology and bronchoscopy.