Gendering Pseudo‐Science: Inchbald's <i>Animal Magnetism</i>
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Elizabeth Inchbald's Animal Magnetism , adapted from Le Médecin Malgré tout le monde by Antoine‐Jean‐Bourlin Dumaniant, engages with a highly controversial issue of the late eighteenth century, the claims made by Anton Mesmer, among others, for the science of “animal magnetism.” A commission appointed by the King of France determined that the effects claimed to be produced by animal magnetism were merely theatrical and imaginative, qualities that were feminized in an attempt to denigrate animal magnetism as pseudo‐science. Inchbald's play follows this attack by satirizing animal magnetism through the absurd character of an old doctor who wishes to learn this pseudo‐science in order to manipulate the affections of his young ward. Inchbald's satire, however, encompasses not only the fraudulent pseudo‐science but also the official patriarchal power that the doctor also represents. Inchbald thus demonstrates the proximity between official structures of power and the supposedly fraudulent pseudo‐science, and meta‐theatrically stages the performance of animal magnetism in a way that exposes the impostures of both. Ultimately, the play valorizes the fluidity of performance demonstrated by the younger characters, and holds up for ridicule the doctor's untheatrical belief in his own “natural” power. The play thereby suggests that what is most dangerous about animal magnetism is in fact its reproduction of and not its divergence from, “legitimate” discourses of power.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it