Anotomy of Observation: From the Académie royale de la Chirurgie to the <i>Salons</i> of Denis Diderot
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article excavates new ways of observing that developed with surgery’s rise as a profession in an effort to counter what has traditionally been characterized as the Enlightenment bias toward vision. From the 1740’s to the early 1780’s eighteenth century surgical science was a discipline in transition. No longer an artisan craft, but not yet what the medical historian Toby Gelfand has called the “new science” that would be the bedrock of the post-revolutionary medical university, surgery became an Enlightenment discipline par excellence. Surgery was at once an aesthetics and a science. A particular focus is given to the distinctive epistemology of observation that was germane to surgery of the 1760s and 1770s in France and the diffusion of that epistemology in the art criticism of Denis Diderot. The goal of the study is to demonstrate eighteenth-century surgery’s exceptional status: its rejection of the priority accorded to vision in cognition as well as its renunciation of the strictly ocular metaphors and fictions in the representation of rationality in Enlightenment discourse.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".