Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Jarvis, Edward

JARVIS, Edward, physician, b. in Concord, Mass., 9 Jan., 1803; d. in Dorchester, Mass., 31 Oct., 1884. He was descended from John Jarvis, a ship-builder who emigrated from Yorkshire, England, to Boston in 1661. He was graduated at Harvard in 1826, and at the Boston medical school in 1830, and practised in Northfield, Mass., in 1830-'2, in Concord, Mass., till 1837, in Louisville, Ky., in 1837-'42, and then in Dorchester, Mass. Dr. Jarvis made a sanitary survey of Massachusetts, by order of the government, and published a report (1855), and subsequently, by appointment of the 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, was president of the American statistical association from 1852 till his death, and published “Practical Physiology” (Philadelphia, 1848); “Primary Physiology for Schools” (1849); and a large number of reports on public health, mortality rates, education, insanity, and other subjects.