The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite its unprecedented mass mortality and recent popularity among historians, the 1918–19 Spanish influenza pandemic rarely figures into national histories. Similarly, national, social, and political histories rarely inform histories of this pandemic. Mark Osborne Humphries attempts to fill these gaps in The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada by examining the effect of the 1918–19 epidemic on the development of Canada's public health system. The devastating influenza epidemic, Humphries argues, was the catalyst that helped change the relationship between state and citizen in the realm of public health beginning in late 1918. Prior to the epidemic, the federal government focused on protecting the Dominion from external, foreign threats. After the epidemic, however, the federal government would take responsibility for the health and social welfare of its people. Humphries's narrative traces public health ideology and strategy in Canada from the nineteenth century through the 1918–19 epidemic. For most of the book, this is a narrative about the continuities in public health practice. Following the cholera pandemics of the early and mid-nineteenth century, federal public health officials established maritime quarantine as their primary strategy for protecting Canadians' health. Even though doctors and public health officials accepted a variety of understandings of disease throughout the century, federal quarantine continued to be basis of Canadian public health. Moreover, federal health officials continued to work separately from underfunded provincial and municipal public health boards responsible for maintaining local sanitary conditions. Quarantine persisted as the federal government's main strategy not only because it addressed political anxieties over increasing immigration, but also because epidemics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not devastating enough to call the effectiveness of quarantine into question. While the rather mild first wave of the 1918–19 influenza epidemic did not expose the limits of maritime quarantine, the second wave did.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| 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".