Between Excess and Inanition: Tobias Smollett’s Medical Model of the State
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tobias Smollett’s medical training in the Boerhaavian tradition helped shape his contributions to debates on luxury, British foreign policy, and public economics. He also invested his medical philosophy with a vast range of political import. This article draws on recent scholarship to outline some of the ways in which medical thought informed the political sensibilities of those writing before Smollett, from Gerard de Malynes and Edward Misselden to William Petty and François Quesnay. Reading Smollett’s novels vis-à-vis his medical and historical works, I analyze the ways in which Smollett deployed his medical philosophy to naturalize his reactionary agenda on issues from Anglo-Scottish fiscal policy to the Seven Years’ War. Attending to Smollett’s revision of the body politic metaphor can help resolve extant scholarly debates concerning Smollett’s axiological orientation.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".