He did not see active service during his time in the army, although he was based at various locations around England and Scotland and did at one point have medical responsibility for some French prisoners.

He found his military experience to be unsatisfying and supplemented his income with occasional private medical work, as well as continuing to study aspects of medicine and, in particular, anatomy.

As a side-effect of this, he thought that student morals would not be subjected to the licentiousness that he perceived to be present in London and that a provincial education would increase the number of doctors practicing outside the capital.

He arranged that his curriculum would comply with the requirements of the London institutions and thus it comprised a seven-month course of 140 lectures as well as lessons and demonstrations in dissection.

He offered a formal, structured programme of study of a type unavailable outside the capital and the few universities that then existed, and he offered an alternative to the more commonly adopted process of medical learning that involved a long apprenticeship to an apothecary, physician or surgeon during which the student was exposed to ad hoc teaching based on presented cases but little or no theoretical teaching.

Recognition returned in 1821, when the Royal College of Surgeons of England also accepted his school as a suitable provider of education for its MRCS diploma.

He occasionally got into trouble both with the law and the general public due to his use of body-snatchers and even the direct involvement of himself and students in the surreptitious procurement of suitable corpses for study.

[2] In 1826 Jordan responded to Turner's challenge, which was creating intense competition both for students and staff, by moving his medical school to purpose-built premises in Mount Street.

[2] However, the attempt to recover lost ground was unsuccessful, in part because Jordan was not an easy person to work with and perhaps also because of objections to the introduction of his young nephew, Edward Stephens, as an instructor.

He moved to West High Street in Salford and then to Stroud in Gloucestershire before living at South Hill Park in Hampstead, London, where he died on 31 March 1873.