First Prize: Help or Harm: Battle Exhaustion and the RCAMC During the Second World War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Stark naked, he was striding through the cordite stench with his head held high and his arms swinging. His body shone white in the brilliant light of the flare… He was singing ‘Home on the Range’ at the top of his lungs. The Worm That Never Dies had taken him.” (Farley Mowat, And No Birds Sang (Toronto: Mclelland and Stewart Ltd., 1979), 229.) As it was known at the time, “battle exhaustion” was an inseparable part of warfare on all fronts. As such, the Canadian army didn’t find itself immune to the effects of psychiatric losses, suffering casualties even before active campaigning had commenced. During the Italian campaign alone 5020 “Neuropsychiatric casualties” were reported, 16.9 percent of total battle casualties. (Terry Copp and Bill McAndrew, Battle Exhaustion, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 187.) What exactly is battle exhaustion, and how does it affect the body and the mind? How did the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps (RCAMC) understand battle exhaustion, when judged against our current perceptions of it? Were the measures that they took sufficient, or did they do more harm then good? Battle exhaustion is an easy condition to be sympathetic to but a much more difficult one to understand. New research has revolutionized the way that the medical community looks at battle exhaustion and combat stress (or immediate Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). (Franklin Jones, Chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” in The Textbooks of Military Medicine, (Washington: The Office of the Surgeon General of the United States, 1995), available at (http://www.bordeninstitute.army.mil/WarPsych/default_index.htm,416. Keeping the current model in mind, the RCAMC’s record in dealing with battle exhaustion is mixed at best. Doctrinal and administrative problems plagued psychiatric patient care from the moment the RCAMC arrived in England. Moreover, debates about the proper psychiatric constitution of a soldier hampered legitimate attempts at proper diagnoses and treatment. Despite this however, Army psychiatrists were unrelenting in their attempts to care for battle exhausted patients. When encountering those who required care, they would do their utmost to safeguard the mental well being of all psychiatric casualties, including those who had succumbed to battle exhaustion. When dealing with such a complex issue, so deeply embedded in the human psyche, no cursory examination is sufficient. However, given what we know of battle exhaustion today, the RCAMC can accurately be judged both by its theoretical foundations, and the physical care given to those in need.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".