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Record W2135643553 · doi:10.1098/rsnr.2009.0032

Dr Thomas Beddoes: chemistry, medicine, and the perils of democracy

2009· article· en· W2135643553 on OpenAlexaff
Trevor H. Levere

Bibliographic record

VenueNotes and Records the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicMedical History and Innovations
Canadian institutionsUniversity of VictoriaUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSuspectDemocracyLawChemistFrench revolutionSociologyClassicsPolitical scienceChemistryHistoryPolitics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Beddoes lectured on chemistry at Oxford in the years that included the French Revolution, the Terror, and the outbreak of war with France, as well as the success in France of the chemical revolution. The very public dispute between Edmund Burke and Joseph Priestley meant that the latter's study of different kinds of air was politically tainted. Beddoes's democratic beliefs and his support for the new chemistry of Lavoisier meant that as chemist and physician he had to deal with complaints that he was potentially seditious and pro-French. His medical theories, allied to pneumatic chemistry and building on the work of Priestley, were accordingly suspect. In spite of that, he became the physician and friend to several members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham and to members of their family, and they in return became his patrons. His collaboration with James Watt was crucial for his development of pneumatic medicine. The full extent of Lunar patronage, and especially that of James Keir and Thomas Wedgwood, has hitherto not been recognized, but it was the concealed scale of that patronage that made possible the execution of Beddoes's ambitious programme of treatment and research.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.997
Threshold uncertainty score0.044

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0030.005
Scholarly communication0.0040.004
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0060.008
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0130.003

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.

Opus teacher head0.028
GPT teacher head0.239
Teacher spread0.211 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations9
Published2009
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueNotes and Records the Royal Society Journal of the History of ScienceSame topicMedical History and InnovationsFrench-language works237,207