‘Why Don't they Get It?’ Talk of Medicine as Science. St Luke's Hospital, Panniqtuuq, Baffin Island
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using diaries, clinical notes and other sources, this contribution explores interactions between Dr J. A. Bildfell and Inuit at Panniqtuuq, Baffin Island, in 1933 and 1934. The article comprises a record of conflict, with two cultures colliding over the provision of health care. Scientific and technological advances in medicine were perceived by Bildfell as possessing the potential to address many of the problems diagnosed among Inuit. However, there was strong resistance to his practices. Bildfell was therefore caught between the promise and potential of his profession and a suppressed admiration for local belief-systems. The paper highlights Inuit resistance, particularly in relation to childbirth. In addition, Bildfell's writings are used to reveal how the construction of the 'other' can be understood as a heuristic device to explain antipathy to the introduction of western medicine. In the longer term, the latter imbedded itself into Qallunaat (non-Inuit)-Inuit relations. The paper also shows that colonial styles of rule are relevant to an appreciation of the foundation of post-colonial challenges to medical science and the consciousness that continues to follow professionals working in cross-cultural settings.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 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 teacher head, 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".