Mending the Sick and Wounded: The Development of Naval Hospitals in the West Indies, 1740–1800
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Until the 1740s, the Royal Navy's policy aimed at caring for sick and wounded seamen both at home and abroad was uncomplicated. It routinely retained London-based contractors who, in turn, employed regional agents to run the day-to-day operations in all of the country's seaport towns and at naval stations abroad. These agents were responsible for leasing sick quarters or temporary hospital buildings, as well as procuring victuals, medical supplies, surgeons and nurses. The contractor system allowed the Admiralty to pay a fixed rate to contractors, which meant it could approximate its annual costs for taking care of sick and wounded seafarers. Once the Sick and Hurt Board became a permanent division of the Royal Navy, however, it bore accountability for the navy's medical decisions. At the Admiralty's urging, the Board set about re-evaluating the long-standing contractor system, and determined that purpose-built naval hospitals were better suited to the navy's expanding needs. Following the immediate success of two naval hospitals erected in Britain, Haslar in Portsmouth and Stonehouse in Plymouth, the navy determined they would benefit from the erection of similar facilities in the West Indies. This paper sets out to explore this transitional period in the Royal Navy's medical branch when it undertook the critical change from a contractor-lead hospital scheme to a navy-controlled system. By investigating individual hospital designs, letters, and hospital muster books, an accurate representation of naval hospitals in the West Indies can be established. In doing so, the notion of an advanced military body emerges, dispelling several misapprehensions about seamen's healthcare during the eighteenth century.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".