Dying to Get Out of the Asylum: Mortality and Madness in Four Mental Hospitals in Victorian Canada, c. 1841–1891
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the status of lunatic cadavers during the second half of the nineteenth century. The first section summarizes cause of death data of over three thousand patients who were admitted to the four principal lunatic asylums in the province of Ontario (Canada). The results illuminate the alleged causes of death, revealing, among other factors, the impact of tuberculosis and general paralysis of the insane. The data also suggest that there was a steady increase in life chances of those entering the mental hospital over the five decades under study. The second section of the article investigates the tension between medical schools and asylum superintendents as educational requirements for nineteenth-century medical education necessitated more and more material for dissection, elevating the status of alienists as gatekeepers to cadavers. The article then concludes by reflecting on what implications these findings have for our understanding of the Victorian lunatic asylum.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".