A physician in public life
Davis was born in Goshen in 1840 and moved to Meriden as a boy. After medical training in New York he succeeded his father in practice. His work took him into local institutions, including the Curtis Home for Widows and Orphans. He served on the school board, sat in the Connecticut legislature and held the mayoralty in the 1880s.
His scholarly interests extended from the physiology of the singing voice to Hebrew, Syriac and ancient Egyptian. He belonged to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London. His substantial History of Wallingford, published in 1870, also covered Meriden and Cheshire, preserving records of the community in which he practised.
An editor between the papyrus and its reader
Putnam published his Egyptian Book of the Dead in 1894. The title page credits Davis with editing, translating and explaining the material. His introduction first lays out a pantheon and an account of Egyptian religion, giving a nineteenth-century English reader a vocabulary in which to understand the funerary texts that follow. Davis’s introductory essays sit alongside ancient compositions written for the care of the dead.
