Textual Healing: Mainstream Protestants and the Therapeutic Text, 1900–1925
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Healing—whether via medical or miraculous means—has increasingly caught the attention of scholars of North American Protestantism within the past decade. Recent studies have convincingly argued that healing was at the heart of Protestant identity, especially in turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States and Canada. Loosely defined as the restoring of physical or emotional well-being with recourse to medical, symbolic, or religious means, healing is often distinguished from curing as a therapeutic approach with more “ho-listic” goals than the cessation of particular physical ailments. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century groups known for their commitment to divine healing and their antipathy to biomedicine, such as Christian Scientists and Pentecostals, are readily fit within this paradigm of healing, but so too are groups often thought to have disparaged faith healing in their embrace of biomedicine, such as mainstream Anglo-Protestants. Through foreign and domestic medical missions, establishing hospitals and medical schools, and initiating deaconess orders, mainstream Protestant groups, including Anglicans and Methodists, made healing central to their public identity and daily practice. In the process, they faced the tricky negotiation of embracing epistemologies of scientific medicine without surrendering their own theologies of God's omnipotent love, all the while living in an increasingly “therapeutic culture.” Complicating their task was their persistent encounter with different, often competing versions of religious healing, whether in the encounter with natives in colonial missions or in the challenge of rival therapeutic theologies such as those of Christian Science. Making their way through this era of increasing medicalization (and increasing contestation of medicalization), mainstream Protestants developed a strain of Christian healing that was unabashedly medicalized and modern, and they testified to its power in print and in practice.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".