Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media Images and Popular Attitudes in America. By Bert Hansen. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009. x, 348 pp. Cloth, $75.00, ISBN 9780-8135-4526-4. Paper, $37.95, ISBN 978-08135-4576-9.)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this wonderfully illustrated study, Bert Hansen, a professor of history at Baruch College, tells an engrossing story about the ways public images have charted the changing status of medicine, doctors, and medical scientists in the United States. Starting with his historical finishing point in the mid-1950s, when publicity about Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was widespread, Hansen illustrates how medical breakthroughs were often dependent on personality (“images idolized the triumphant doctor's mysterious genius”) as much as on medical techniques and equipment (“the vaccine bottle and the syringe”) (pp. 4–5). The book traces the rise of “heroic medical portraiture” from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, but it marks Louis Pasteur's rabies shots in the 1880s as a key international event that initiated a seventy-year golden age of medical science. The first chapter focuses on medical imagery before the Pasteur breakthrough to frame a seventy-year narrative of heroic iconography up to the late 1950s and 1960s when, Hansen argues, “doubts arose about medical process” and “cracks of hesitation and skepticism” emerged in what was hitherto a persuasive story about the grand march of medical science (pp. 5, 10).
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".