Edward Jarvis

Edward Jarvis (9 January 1803, Concord, Massachusetts – 31 October 1884, Dorchester, Massachusetts) was an American physician.

Biography He was descended from John Jarvis, a shipbuilder who emigrated from Yorkshire, England, to Boston in 1661. He attended public school in Concord, and Westford Academy. He graduated from Harvard in 1826. In 1827 he taught school in Concord, also studying with Josiah Bartlett.

Jarvis made a sanitary survey of Massachusetts, by order of the government, and published a report (1855), and subsequently, by appointment of the United States Secretary of the Interior, he tabulated the mortality statistics of the United States as reported in the census of 1860, his work constituting one half of the fourth volume of the reports of the eighth census. He was a member of numerous learned societies, and was president of the American Statistical Association from 1852 until his death. In 1863, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.

Additionally, Jarvis wrote a large number of reports on public health, mortality rates, education, insanity, and other subjects. In his 1871 essay entitled Relation of Education to Insanity, Jarvis argued that too much education was directly linked to increased rates of insanity.

Works