Mary Wilson Carpenter, Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mary Wilson Carpenter's Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England, part of the Victorian Life and Times series, is a concise introduction to the topic intended for newcomers to the history of medicine and disease. Carpenter, Professor Emerita of English at Queen's University in Canada, is a scholar of Victorian literature, culture and feminism. Carpenter's work is probably not well known to most historians of medicine though she presents work in the field and has mentored several students in disability studies. Carpenter's book is particularly valuable for its inclusion of disability history, a topic on which histories of medicine typically provide somewhat scanty coverage. The book presents itself as a social history of Victorian medicine, focusing in particular on the gendered and classed dimension of suffering and care, and Carpenter has chosen to illustrate these themes largely through a study of specific afflictions. Between an opening chapter on patients, practitioners and the organisation of care, and a closing chapter on women as patients and practitioners (the best in the book, unsurprisingly) are chapters on cholera, tuberculosis, syphilis, smallpox, deafness and blindness. Carpenter uses each chapter to good effect, highlighting important issues emerging from a study of the diseases, or infirmities, as the Victorians termed them, in question. Thus, the cholera chapter skilfully weaves in tales of anatomy and empire. Similarly, the smallpox chapter introduces students to anti-vaccination, the tuberculosis chapter to Thomas McKeown's work, and the syphilis chapter to the controversies over the Contagious Diseases Acts. One might wish for more discussion of particular topics including traditional sanitary reform in the case of cholera or the sanatorium movement in the case of TB (particularly given the ‘long nineteenth-century’ frame Carpenter adopts), but the multi-disciplinary content of Carpenter's chapters, mixing literary and historical analyses, forces unavoidable omissions.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".