From Practice to Print: Women Crafting Authority at the Margins of Orthodox Medicine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes how a category of women possessing medical secrets known as “femmes à secrets” entered commercial medicine in mid- to late-xviiith-century Paris. It reads sources including remedy patents and printed publicity with a view to exploring women’s agency in producing and peddling medical products and services within the burgeoning marketplace. It shows how this form of “fringe” practice provided a unique forum where women cultivated their authority outside of learned medicine while also interacting with it. In doing so, the article displaces traditional narratives which position charlatans and quacks as the primary practitioners who colonized the margins of medical practice. Instead, it provides an account of women as examples of the dynamic “fringe” practitioners who strove to prove their genuine authority across a variety of domains. By bringing their practice to print, enterprising women succeeding in staking out their claim to expertise in a growing and increasingly consumerist, legislated, and policed medical milieu, where the boundaries between “expert” and “amateur” knowledge traditions were becoming increasingly blurred.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".