Speaking Secrets: Epilepsy, Neurosurgery, and Patient Testimony in the Age of the Explorable Brain, 1934–1960
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the role of Wilder Penfield's patients in early neurosurgeries for epilepsy at the Montreal Neurological Institute from the 1930s to 1950s. Shifting the focus from scientific discoveries that emerged as a result of Penfield's unprecedented "exploration" of the brain, this piece considers how patients contributed to the creation of such knowledge through their spoken feedback, both within and beyond the operating room. Correspondingly, it examines the personal and social contexts under which patients elected for surgery. Tracing an underexplored social history of Penfield's patients through more than sixty clinical records, it suggests that making knowledge about the brain was a multidirectional process in which patients meaningfully participated, and in which their experiences of epilepsy and motivations for surgery were significant.
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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 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".