The Autobiography of Edward Jarvis (1803-1884)

Edward Jarvis's Autobiography (completed in 1873) was dictated, in the third person when he was seventy, to his wife, Almira (1804-1884), a silent figure who was an alter ego throughout their marriage. It gives a retrospective view of his life, is a reworking of the diaries he kept as a young man, and an interesting document of re-written, oral autobiography, but it is not a "confession" in the Starobinski/Rousseau sense, nor an evident psychohistory. It provides a reassuring self-image of a doctor looking back on his earlier life and on the disappointments and frustrations of a medical profession whose acquired norms were tragically contradicted by reality. Edward Jarvis (1803-1884) was the fourth of seven children of a farmer of modest means in Concord, Massachusetts. Between 1820 and 1826 he studied at Harvard, where his friends and room-mates were the future historian and theorist of Jacksonian democracy Richard Hildreth (1807-1865), who was studying law, and the future Unitarian theologian George Washington Hosmer, who was then a student of the Divinity College. In the period of panic and economic depression between 1837 and 1842 he was forced to abandon his dreams of joining the Boston medical establishment, and he went to work in Louisville, Kentucky. It was there that he reached maturity in a society where racial prejudice was accepted as normal. Jarvis belonged to the generation of intellectuals who, between 1848 and 1860, tried to cope with the profound cultural conflict which led from the crisis of the Union to the Civil War. This, apart from a brief reference to his statistical essay on the conditions of health of the Union Army, is not mentioned in the Autobiography. The omission is part and parcel of the limits he imposed on himself as a result of the unexpected revival of memories and dreams. All that he leaves unsaid poses the question of why a psychiatrist actively engaged, like the young Thomas Story Kirkbride (1809-1883), in forward-looking forms of treatment should write his account in the third person avoiding the intimate first person which he had used in his diaries. If Jarvis's autobiography was completely normal within the cultural context in which it was written, it was at the same time anomalous in its contents; we are shown both the mask and the face of its author, an ambivalence which is worth exploring at close range. Jarvis's Autobiography has remained unpublished, although the manuscript seems to have been prepared for publication. Other original documents also exist: his diaries, notes made on journeys, and the more personal correspondence addressed to his wife, Almira. At Concord, Massachusetts, the Free Public Library has carefully preserved the memory of Jarvis's childhood and adolescence, his life as a young man, and his cultural roots.