Front Lines and Frontiers: War as Legitimate Work for Nurses, 1939–1945
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over 4,000 nurses served with the Canadian armed forces during the Second World War, comprising a second generation of military nurses known by rank and title as Nursing Sisters. Military medical records and personal accounts reveal that military nurses enjoyed an elite professional status based on their relative closeness to the front lines of combat and to the frontiers of medical technology. Reductions in morbidity and mortality rates were frequently attributed to the presence of Nursing Sisters in forward field units. While Nursing Sisters capitalized on their position within the armed forces to enhance their expertise and develop expanded practice roles, such efforts were contingent on geographical setting, the availability of physicians and medical orderlies, and the social construction of medical technologies as men’s or women’s work. Flexibility and autonomy were more evident closer to the front lines, where patient acuity was higher, skilled personnel fewer, and risk-taking more acceptable. Such flexible boundaries, however, were “for the duration” only. Plus de 4 000 infirmieres ont servi dans les forces armees canadiennes durant la Deuxieme Guerre mondiale, formant une deuxieme generation d’infirmieres militaires. On decouvre a l’etude des dossiers medicaux militaires et des recits personnels que les infirmieres militaires jouissaient d’un statut professionnel d’elite du fait d’etre a proximite relative des zones de combat et aux premieres loges de la technologie medicale. La reduction des taux de morbidite et de mortalite etaient souvent attribuee a la presence des infirmieres militaires dans les unites de campagne sur les fronts de guerre. Si les infirmieres militaires profitaient de leur position au sein des forces armees pour gagner en expertise et accroitre leur role de praticiennes, de tels efforts etaient fonction de l’emplacement geographique, de la disponibilite de medecins et de preposes aux soins et de la construction sociale voulant que les technologies medicales soient du ressort des hommes ou des femmes. Il y avait davantage de souplesse et d'autonomie pres des lignes de front, ou l’acuite des besoins du patient etait plus grande, le personnel qualifie, moins nombreux et les risques, plus acceptables. Cette flexibilite ne valait toutefois que « pour la duree » du conflit.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".