Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Against the Current: The Memoirs of Boris Ragula Marianne Fedunkiw (bio) Inge Sanmiya. Against the Current: The Memoirs of Boris Ragula McGill-Queen’s University Press. 202. $34.95 Against the Current is the second book in a new series published by McGill-Queen's University Press. The Footprints Series focuses on 'life stories' of Canadians, stories which 'help nuance larger historical narratives, at times reinforcing those narratives, at other times contradicting them.' The series is breaking new historical ground, opening up avenues for stories of newer Canadians such as Boris Ragula, who emigrated to take up a medical internship at St Joseph's Hospital in London, Ontario in 1954. In fact, two-thirds of the book deals with Ragula's life before he arrived in Canada. He was born in 1920 in Turec, Belarus, under Polish rule at that time. His father, a physician, died of typhoid, leaving his mother Nadzia with two sons under two. The book is well written and a smooth read, balancing a strong narrative thread with some endnotes, helpful maps, and many pictures. The strongest chapters are the first five, which tell of Ragula's childhood in Belarus; his capture and escape from a German pow camp during the Second World War; his torture in and escape from the nkvd Baranovichi prison; his role in the Belarusian resistance; and finally, after the end of the war, his marriage to Ludmila, medical studies in Germany and Belgium, and his meeting with Pope Pius xii in Rome. Strangely, Ragula's five decades in Canada are covered in just forty-three pages. Two of the most interesting anecdotes while he was in Canada relate to Ragula's challenges with English and his experience as a resident when his diagnosis went counter to that of a specialist. Ragula applied to write his Ontario Medical Council examinations in February 1955, against the advice of his fellow interns who had come from [End Page 586] Germany, India, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Yugoslavia and many of whom had written the exams with no success, in part because of difficulties with English. Ragula tells how he used Latin for his anatomy test and elected to give his answers to the biochemistry exam in chemical formulae. The examiner had to conduct the exam using formulae as well. At one point, the examiner, impressed with Ragula's unorthodox efforts, muttered, 'You make me sick!' Ragula, unaware of the colloquial expression, was stunned. He thought the examiner was truly ill. The examiner explained that this was an idiomatic expression and this was the first time anyone had written a paper entirely using chemical formulae. The second incident happened soon after. A senior staff member in gynecology asked Ragula to write a medical history for a thirty-nine-year-old Ukrainian-Canadian immigrant named Nadia who the specialist believed had a mass in her uterus. After examining Nadia, who, like Ragula spoke Russian, Ragula told the patient and the specialist that he believed the mass was in fact a fetus and that a hysterectomy was definitely unnecessary. Sanmiya writes that after Ragula spoke to the specialist, 'He nearly ruptured my eardrum when he started yelling into the phone that I should keep my opinions to myself, do my duty as an intern, and stop questioning "qualified" staff.' Ragula told the patient to avoid surgery by refusing to sign the consent form. Six months later, Nadia delivered a boy, whom she affectionately called 'the tumour' and she and her son became Ragula's patients. As a family physician, Ragula was interested in public health education, led a fight against smoking (at a time when he was in the vanguard among physicians), and used hypnosis in his practice. He also became involved in aid to Belarus and Belarusian politics, serving as president of the Belarusian National Republic's Rada from 1996 to 1998. The epilogue deals with his interest in Belarus, particularly since the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station meltdown in 1986. There is one error in this section: in an account of events following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Sanmiya lists the leaders of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine who met in December of...
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".