Madness, Suicide and the Victorian Asylum: Attempted Self-Murder in the Age of Non-Restraint
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 20 July 1870, Catherine Tyrrell found herself transferred to another asylum. The 32-year-old nurse suffering from melancholia had previously been a private patient in Bethlem Hospital; but, having had her twelve months expire at that institution, she was conveyed across the metropolis and into the bucolic countryside and county asylum of Buckinghamshire. Up to this point, Catherine had had a long and sad history of suicide attempts and food refusal. Indeed, when she was transferred the following year, this time from Buckinghamshire to the Surrey County Asylum at Wandsworth, she was listed as “very suicidally disposed”. Now diagnosed as suffering from “mania”, she managed only three months before arriving at her fourth institution in as many years—the Surrey County Asylum at Brookwood. On admission, the medical superintendent described, with transparent disapproval, the precautionary clothing that held her suicidal impulses in check: She was brought in a canvas garment which fitted her person even down to her ankles, the arms however not going through the sleeves, but being folded across her chest close to her skin, the hands being locked in leather gloves. The jacket or whatever it is called being [fastened] at the back by 5 locks. All this complicated arrangement was immediately removed. There was no clothing of ordinary kind under it.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".