arvis' personal beliefs were able to alter the truth.
             Jarvis was not the only one guilty of this. A notable physician/scientist, Samuel George Morton, also had his own prejudiced ideas. His beliefs reflected the relation between race and cranial capacity which were believed to mirror intellectual capacity. Even more recent, Dorothy Lewis advocates her viewpoints concerning adolescents. Her personal opinion was that youths locked up in correctional facilities would tend to be more violent than those housed in a psychiatric hospitals. Like Jarvis, both Morton and Lewis also let their personal beliefs undermine their ability to perform unbiased research.
             Polluted perceptions about mental illness are clearly shown throughout Stoep and Link's article. Jarvis' biased beliefs have been detrimental to our society back then as well as today, being that patients went untreated. Stoep and Link state, "Perhaps his own New World middle class, Protestant, agrarian values had blinded Jarvis, an erudite scientist, to the facts embedded within his own carefully collected data" (1402). His power and personal values tainted the outcome of his research and experiments.
             In the nineteenth century, there was limited research and information about mental illness as a disease; in fact, it was poorly understood by many, including doctors: "The definitions of mental health status used by Jarvis are less clear. The psychiatric nosological categories of the day included 'insane lunatics' and 'feeble-minded idiots.' In the lay and medical literature, insane persons were described as melancholic, maniacal, or simple mad" (1397). People were quite confused about mental illness and it was referred to and labeled many different names.
             Interestingly, Jarvis' conclusions tended to gain credibility for the simple reason that he was educated and had over fifty years experience including h...