"In consequence of enemy action": British medical students in North American medical schools, 1939-45
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 1940 and 1945, the Rockefeller Foundation offered fellowships for British medical students to complete their medical training in North America.1 2 3 4 These fellowships arose from the damage caused by the extensive aerial bombardment of medical facilities across Britain and shortages of qualified teachers to train students. To the American committee at the Rockefeller Foundation that provided their fellowships, these medical students became another thread in the enlarging fabric of the “special relationship.” To the British committee charged with selecting them, these students represented a last line of defence, a contingent of students able to fight on should Britain be occupied.5 6 Between two worlds (Jack Vettriano’s On the Border , 1995) www.jackvettriano.com Documents from both sides of the Atlantic record the programme that emerged, although the story is chiefly captured by papers held in the Rockefeller Archives (but for a pithy discussion, see Hill7). An early memorandum by Robert Lambert (Rockefeller Foundation) and John Fulton (a Yale physiologist) from September 1940 offers a sense of the origins of the programme: “Fulton has in mind a limited group—not more than a hundred. Thinks US and Canadian medical schools would give free tuition. Yale might take 5, Harvard 10, Columbia 10, etc.”8 The Rockefeller Foundation subsequently allocated $5000 per student,9 while articles in medical journals justified the programme as a consequence of enemy action and the beginning of a new era of cooperation between British and American medical schools.10 In a letter to the BMJ Henry Dale observed that the interchange of medical personnel was the continuation of international collaborations begun by Anglo-American physiologists.11 By March 1941, a letter between the Rockefeller’s Alan Gregg and Edward Mellanby (secretary of the MRC) reveals that the programme was operational and hailed enthusiastically as a “practicable …
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.050 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
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".