The Medical Practice of the Sexed Body: Women, Men, and Disease in Britain, circa 1600-1740
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although it has been widely argued that pre-Enlightenment western medicine ascribed to a one-sex (male) model of the body, this theory has never been evaluated in terms of medical practice. This article seeks to determine the usefulness of such a model for early modern Britain, circa 1600-1740, by examining how medical practitioners responded to three common illnesses that afflicted both male and female patients: venereal disease, smallpox, and malaria. It concludes that, despite a number of similarities, medical treatment of such illnesses was marked by important differences which were based upon the sex of the patient. Due to its unique physiological functions (vaginal discharge, menstruation, pregnancy, and lactation), the female body was considered by practitioners to be capable of manifesting, transmitting, and responding to disease and treatment in ways that the male body could not. This awareness provided practitioners with additional reasons to monitor, and alter, medical treatment in their female patients. In fact, the different constitutions of men and women meant that the patient body was much more complex than the theory of a one-sex model suggests. Furthermore, differences in medical treatment were influenced by age, a variable which was inexorably linked to physiological changes in the 'sexed' body.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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 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".