Bibliographic record
Abstract
To the Editor: I just read the article on the Osler Fellows at McGill by Steinert et al1 and thought it inspiring. Their ability to build a community of teacher/scholars around a select and substantive shared fellowship is a wonderful remedy for the alienation that many feel as the academy becomes more corporate. By returning to notions of guildlike fellowship, McGill's educational approach somehow right-sizes the educational dynamic and makes it personal by making it communal. The close connection between communal life and the arts and trades is reaffirmed in the origins of the word company, or compagnia, as related in Iris Origo's2 classic The Merchant of Prato. In this depiction of daily life in a late Medieval/early Renaissance Tuscan town, Origo describes the origins of Tuscan companies “and the immense credit they came to enjoy”: The compagnia was originally a small family partnership—between father and son, or several brothers—men who lived in the same house, who broke the same bread (as the word compagno implies), whose interests were identical…. Subsequently, these companies were extended to include members outside the family circle. The images of early artisans and guildsmen breaking bread together, having common experiences, and sharing a common cause came to mind as I read about the McGill experience. I think Steinert and her colleagues rediscovered something quite important about how ordinary people are transformed into doctors and how that professionalism is nurtured over time. They remind us it is not a solo venture but one undertaken in community, not for isolated scholars but a journey best done in the company of fellow travelers. Simply put: There is something powerful and synergistic about working and collaborating, building relationships, and fostering a sense of shared mission and intergenerational obligation. Osler3 understood this and wrote of the necessity of a “fraternal attitude” in medical education, reminding us that: You have all become brothers in a great society…. A fraternal attitude is not easy to cultivate—the chasm between the chair and the bench is difficult to bridge…. When a simple earnest spirit animates a college, there is no appreciable interval between the teacher and the taught—both are in the same class, the one a little more advanced than the other. So animated, the student feels that he has joined a family whose honour is his honour, whose welfare is his own, and whose interests should be his first consideration. Joseph J. Fins, MD Chief, Division of Medical Ethics, professor of medicine, professor of public health, and professor of medicine in psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, New York; [email protected].
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 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 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
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".