'TALKING ABOUT DOWN THERE': THE DEVELOPMENT OF A PUBLIC DISCUSSION OF CERVICAL CANCER IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation emerged from personal and political concerns and aims to fill a historiographical lacuna. This thesis is a study of how Canadian women learned about cervical cancer and its prevention in the twentieth century. In particular, this thesis seeks to understand how, when and in what forms did a public discussion of cervical cancer prevention develop in late twentieth century Canada. Cervical cancer is significant in terms of its place in disease history. When discovered in the pre-cancerous stage, cervical cancer is quite preventable. Since the 1960s, the medical community has been aware that Pap smears can be used to recognize pre-cancerous lesions and that deaths from cervical cancer were avoidable. Its uniqueness as a “preventable” cancer provides an example of the relationship between scientific knowledge, public health, and popular practice. The public dialogue about cervical cancer prevention, I argue, was complex. There were numerous groups that were part of this public discussion including medical doctors, the medical profession, medical educators, women’s health activists, women’s organizations, newspapers, women’s press, individual women and support groups, and the municipal, provincial and state agencies. This thesis demonstrates that while dialogue among these historical actors was rarely in conflict, tensions did emerge as medical practitioners, women’s health activists and public health officials debated how best to link biomedical knowledge with preventive health policies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".