A Population Falling Ill: The Poor Health of Saxons in the Long Eighteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article focuses on physical infirmity, health, and nutrition in Saxony in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With the surviving muster rolls of the Saxon army, both health and nutritional status of servicemen can be examined. The military administration's focus of recording health-related issues changed, however. An earlier recording of injuries and also diseases of soldiers was replaced by a more general medical assessment that also generated public health-related information. From these data a trend of physical infirmity and nutritional status is derived. It is clear that around 1820, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, servicemen generally were in poor health because many of them suffered from war injuries, while many others simply were malnourished and ill. The nutritional status, as depicted in average height, declined sharply thereafter, and malnourishment and diseases related to it continued to be prevalent well into the nineteenth century, a period in which Saxony, a pioneering region of German industrialization, experienced rapid economic growth. Although the Saxon conscript data on height and physical fitness was studied systematically in the middle of the nineteenth century, substantial attempts of reform based on these data to improve the nutritional status of the population cannot be observed.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".