Fracastoro’s De Contagione and Medieval Reflection on ‘Action at a Distance’: Old and New Trends in Renaissance Discourse on Contagion
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the Renaissance, the horrors and mysteries of contagion1 were manifested in their most terrible form by two mysterious diseases: syphilis, recently introduced in Europe,2 and the plague, which had reappeared in the West at the end of the fourteenth century.3 The works dedicated to syphilis were still relatively few and did not constitute a popular genre, but the latter had already inspired a considerable literature which expressed both a desperate feeling of impotence in the face of a curse which defied all human resistance, and a renewed effort to understand it. Thus, depending on what we are looking for, we can find in these works either remnants of archaic notions, such as explanations in terms of divine wrath or the use of analogical and magical thinking, or the first manifestations of a medical revolution in progress.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it