“A Plea for the Prostate”: Doctors, Prostate Dysfunction, and Male Sexuality in Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historical examinations of medical discourse concerning male sexuality have focused on the perceived linkage between masturbation and sexual neurasthenia. However, more tangible conditions such as prostatic hypertrophy were also linked to the sexual misconduct of young and old men. This paper examines both the medical discourse concerning prostatic hypertrophy and how the development of treatment was influenced by contemporary concerns with both sexuality and masculinity. It argues that mainstream doctors moved away from the Victorian preoccupation with the dangers of illicit sexuality and increasingly regarded the restoration of sexual function as being in the best interests of their patients. This view was particularly evident in their quest for an operative method that would cure prostatic hypertrophy while preserving potency.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".