Nursing alum, textbook author makes gift to renovate auditorium

They may not recognize her face, but nursing students everywhere know her name.

As in, “Get out your Jarvis.” “Look it up in Jarvis.” “Turn to page 41 of Jarvis.”

A go-to resource for many nursing students, “Physical Examination & Health Assessment” is often referred to simply by the last name of its author, Carolyn Jarvis, who earned her doctorate at UIC in 2005.

Soon, students at the UIC College of Nursing will know her name for another reason. Jarvis has made a major gift to fund a rehab of the first-floor auditorium on the Chicago campus. The fully modernized and updated auditorium will be named the Carolyn Jarvis Auditorium.

The largest lecture hall in the College of Nursing’s Chicago campus building, the auditorium is part of the original 55-year-old building. As the college grows — enrollment in the bachelor of science in nursing program went up by 11% last fall — the goal of the project is to increase capacity and outfit the space with the latest technology.

Huge possibilities

It was while taking a tour of the building recently that Jarvis said she was “sold” on donating the money to update it.

“While we were walking through the auditorium, students came and sat down. They said they had to come early because there weren’t enough seats,” Jarvis said. “They were using folding chairs.”

Jarvis spent much of her career teaching pathophysiology, pharmacology and health assessment at Illinois Wesleyan University School of Nursing and Health Sciences in Bloomington (when not working on her book or as a nurse practitioner). Those classes will be taught in the new auditorium, and Jarvis said she saw “huge possibilities” in the renovation.

Her gift will allow the college to remove a stage, increase the capacity from 92 to 160 seats, make it accessible for those with disabilities and add audio/visual equipment to improve instructional capabilities.

“My idea of teaching pathophysiology and pharmacology is asking a lot of questions and getting students engaged and talking,” Jarvis said. “If the students were more comfortable in their seating and had more space … I think it would be more conducive to those critical professor-student interactions.”

College of Nursing alum

Jarvis was already a successful textbook author when she decided to get her doctorate at UIC College of Nursing in the early 2000s. In addition to her work revising the textbook and teaching at Illinois Wesleyan, she worked as a nurse practitioner at an alcohol-treatment facility in Bloomington.

To better understand the behaviors she was seeing at the alcohol-treatment facility, she wanted to increase her knowledge of basic sciences through research.

“I love the basic sciences,” she said. “I need to know how things work, and UIC was the only (nursing school) that was going to give me a grounding in the basic sciences.”

With her home base in Bloomington, she commuted to Chicago two days a week (staying overnight with her parents in Oak Park) to complete her PhD coursework. Her research focused on the cardiovascular effects of alcohol.

“I formed very close relationships with my classmates,” she said. “It was a really good fit with my advisor (Mariann Piano). She had very high expectations, and I was ready for the challenge that she posed. I really wanted to work hard for her goals and my goals and the basic science.”

One thing Jarvis never talked about with her classmates in the doctoral program was her textbook, although some knew about it.

“I feel like my name is famous, but I’m not famous,” she said. “That’s as it should be. The book is the most important thing.”

She authored the first edition of “Physical Examination” in 1992 after being approached by the publisher, Elsevier, who had worked with her on chapters of other books. With crisp writing and photos that complemented the topics, it was an immediate hit.

Jarvis has revised it every four years — the most recent edition, the ninth, with co-author Ann Eckhardt. (Daughter Sarah Jarvis, a nurse practitioner in Ann Arbor, Michigan, contributed to a chapter in the ninth edition.) It’s been translated into nearly a dozen languages and has maintained a high market share of health assessment books. Now 78, Jarvis is ready to hand future revisions off new authors.

Her decision to make a gift to UIC College Nursing was in part to acknowledge the impact of her experience there, and in part to ensure the future success of students, she said. She added that she admires the diversity among UIC nursing students and wants to continue to encourage diversity in the nursing profession.

“It was a goal of mine to pay back UIC,” Jarvis said. “Really, UIC was the capstone of my learning.”