The rise of the penitentiary: prisons and punishment in early America

did not even receive a proper education until the death of elder siblings promoted him in the family fortunes. After a spell of school-teaching, Jarvis, who had aspirations to become a preacher, finally gained a medical training, but quickly discovered that this was no freeway to fame. Barely lucrative practices near his native Concord (Massachusetts) were followed by an uncomfortable spell at Louisville, Kentucky, whose frontier ways and slave culture clearly offended our hero's principled New England sensibilities. The rest of Jarvis's career was spent in and around his native Massachusetts, where, failing to gain the remunerative practices to which he thought he was entitled, he sought and found consolation in pursuit of the more intellectual and scientific aspects of medicine, making himself an expert in psychological medicine, in public health, and, above all, in the evolving field of medical statistics. Opportunities to address learned societies on both sides of the Atlantic on topics similar to those that fascinated William Farr (by whom he was somewhat overawed on finally meeting him in person) seem to have formed the highspots of his career. Jarvis dictated his autobiography (which is written in the third person) to his devoted wife, Almira, when in his seventies; and, as Rosalba Davico points out in her ambitious Introduction, the after-the-event apologetic nature of the work needs, therefore, to be offset by reference to other sources (which she does) if was are to gain an balanced picture of his existence. Albeit writing in a calm and dignified tone, Jarvis does not disguise the sense of frustration and failure that attended much of his medical career. As he never seeks to hide, he was continually passed over for advantageous practices, sometimes for sectarian religious reasons, and he never gained the challenging asylum superintendent's appointment that he clearly believed would exercise his talents. Personal considerations apart, Jarvis's text affords a splendid commentary upon the over-stocked and intensely competitive character of the American medical market-place at mid-century (as admirably analysed in Paul Starr's The social transformation ofAmerican medicine [New York, Basic Books, 1982]), and reveals the patient-driven nature of preferred medical philosophies and therapeutics. Historians of Britain will also find Jarvis's comments on Old World medicine quite illuminating, not least the reverence that Jarvis evidently felt due to figures like John Conolly. It is hard to imagine a more succinct and telling verdict upon public lunatic asylums than this response upon visiting Hanwell: