The Power of Plagues By Irwin W. Sherman Washington, DC: ASM Press, 2006. 442 pp., illustrated. $39.95 (cloth)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Power of Plagues is a nicely presented volume with 400-plus pages of text, enhanced by numerous black and white images, that describe how plagues have shaped human history. A topical (rather than chronological) approach is used to explore key plagues from ancient to modern times. In addition to discussing plagues caused by infectious diseases, the author devotes 1 chapter to plagues that resulted from micronutrient deficiencies. The author describes the 3 objectives of this text: “to place infectious disease in a historical context,” “to describe the nature and evolution of diseases,” and “to show how the past could prepare us for future encounters with infectious diseases” (p. viii).The strength of this book lies in the historical descriptions of disease outbreaks and, in particular, in the discussions of societal responses to disease and the social upheaval that frequently accompanied dramatic outbreaks of disease. In terms of describing the nature and evolution of diseases (the author's second major objective), this text is disappointing. Exploration of the causes of outbreaks and changing disease incidence are largely one dimensional, focusing on a single factor and ignoring other significant contributing factors. The complex interplay of environment, microbe, host, and society in the emergence of plagues is not explored, nor is there an explicit recognition of the multifactorial nature of disease emergence. Inaccuracies and imprecise wording that is prone to misinterpretation mar discussions of disease features and pathogenesis. A number of interpretations are counter to conventional wisdom and are provided without supporting discussion or recognition of more traditional explanations. For instance, the Cyprian plague, which is conventionally considered to be caused by either measles or smallpox, is attributed to ergotism. Inconsistent with the attribution to ergotism is the accompanying statement that the disease spread quickly through person-to-person contact and contaminated clothing.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.062 | 0.052 |
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".