Sex, Sin, and Science: A History of Syphilis in America. By John Parascandola. (Westport: Praeger, 2008. xx, 195 pp. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-275-99430-3.)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Sex, Sin, and Science, John Parascandola examines how cultural values shaped the responses of health officials, military leaders, and the general public to syphilis. A former United States Public Health Service historian, Parascandola is particularly interested in the history of public health efforts to control venereal disease. He argues that the tensions between morality and medicine have constrained attempts to eliminate such disease. Parascandola synthesizes the findings of key secondary sources to provide a broad, chronological overview of the history of syphilis. He begins with a chapter on the disease in Europe in the late fifteenth century and the ongoing debates over whether syphilis had New World origins. He discusses medical writers who blamed women for the spread of the disease, and he notes the use of mercury as the primary Western treatment until the twentieth century. Although the book includes a chapter on syphilis in America from the colonial era through the nineteenth century, its main focus is on the twentieth century, when the United States Public Health Service defined its role in fighting the disease and scientists developed important methods of diagnosis and treatment. In 1906 August von Wasserman developed a blood test to identify syphilis. In 1910 Paul Ehrlich discovered the effectiveness of the drug Salvarsan in treating the symptoms of venereal disease, and by 1943 penicillin proved to be an even more effective remedy. Still, concerns about morality continued to plague public health programs.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.045 | 0.010 |
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".