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BOOK REVIEWS81 marriages among feminists and the relative success of these unions. Her analysis of her subjects' social origins does not provide any major surprises and she does not go much beyond conventional wisdom in unravelling the motivation of feminists or in placing them in relation to their milieu. But there is real value to the book, whether or not it shatters myths or provides spectacular insights. Whatever its weaknesses on particular points, The Shvery of Sex provides a convenient, sensible, and good-tempered account of feminist-abolitionists, sympathetic to them yet aware of their limitations by present-day standards. Ronald G. Walters The Johns Hopkins University Edward Jarvis and the Medical World of Nineteenth-century America. By Gerald N. Grob. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978. Pp. ix, 299. $14.00.) "Thehealth ofhuman beings is determined by their behavior, their food, and the nature of their environment," the medical critic and public health reformer John H. Knowles has written;". . . over 99 per cent of us are born healthy and made sick as a result of personal misbehavior and environmental conditions." The rediscovery of this truth in our own time is in many respects the rediscovery of the work of Dr. Edward Jarvis (1803-1884), the subject of Gerald N. Grob's thoughtful and comprehensive biography. Raised in a devout household, exposed at Harvard to the tenets of Unitarianism, Common Sense philosophy, and Baconian science, and skeptical of the therapeutic excesses of his day, Jarvis conceived of die physician's role in didactic and prophylactic terms. Believing that much needless death, disability, and insanity arose "from an ignorance of those laws of our being," he embarked on a oneman crusade to instruct the citizenry in preventive techniques—a citizenry he assumed, with characteristic nineteenth-century optimism, to be sufficiendy free and rational to heed his advice. Jarvis was more than a health catechist, however; he also conducted a number of important statistical investigations, most notably his Report on Insanity and Idiocy in Massachusetts (1855). Like his contemporary, Adolphe Quetelet, Jarvis held that sound preventive principles had to be grounded in accurate data, otherwise false conclusions might be derived from even the most painstaking analysis. For thirty-two years President of the American Statistical Association, he was a constant critic of the inadequacies of the federal census, and a tireless advocate of improved vital statistics. The great irony of his career was that his concerns were adopted, not by his medical colleagues, who were to become increasingly preoccupied with bacteriology and cellular pathology, but by the emerging social scientific professions, which from their inception shared his quantitative orientation. Jarvis is not an easy subject for biography. Although devoted to his 82CIVIL WAR HISTORY wife and kindly toward his private psychiatric patients, he was somewhat rigid and compulsive, always happiest when lost in die minutiae of his statistical studies. While admiring his energy and die breadth of his interests, one never quite warms to the man himself. The problem is compounded by the fact that Jarvis abruptly discontinued his diary in 1842, leaving a critical forty-two year period when relatively little is known of his personal life. Grob has skirted this difficulty by fashioning what might be termed a workography, a catalogue raisonne ofJarvis'writings and achievements. In lesser hands this approach might have led to the most pedestrian kind of scholarship, but Grob makes it palatable by interspersing a generous amount of interpretation, always taking care to relate Jarvis' thought to contemporary intellectual and scientific trends. The picture that finally emerges is ofa statistical man of letters, not gifted with methodological insight or possessed of great institutional leverage, but nevertheless plugged firmly into a vast and important network ofcorrespondents. He communicated regularly, and at times copiously, with such eminent figures as Quetelet, William Farr, Lemuel Shattuck, and J. D. B. DeBow; his recently discovered letter books are a virtual Who's Who of nineteenth-century vital statisticians. By placing Jarvis in this larger context, Grob has managed to produce a book tiiat is exactly what its title claims to be: an account of a medical world, as well as the life of a single man. David T. Courtwright University of...

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