The Making of Modern Medicine: Turning Points in the Treatment of Disease Michael Bliss
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Michael Bliss's revised and expanded Joanne Goodman Lectures, given by invitation of the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario in 2008.In just 100 pages (including endnotes), the author summarizes his work and contributions to the history of medicine in Canada, with a particular emphasis on "faith," both religious and secular.The question he asks is, how did (most) Westerners come to have such great faith in modern medical science?Using case studies drawn from the North Atlantic Triangle of late 19th-and early 20th-century Canada, the United States, and Great Britain, Bliss answers it is because practitioners such as William Osler and Harvey Cushing first promised and then delivered successful diagnoses, prognoses, prophylaxes, and-most important-therapies.Each of three chapters considers a single focal point.In the first, Bliss explains that the 1885 Montreal smallpox epidemic was so devastating because French-Canadians' Anglophobia and faith in a divine higher power encouraged reliance on outmoded sanitation measures and fueled fatalism in the face of this plague.This was a time when even the best-trained physicians could treat symptoms but rarely cure diseases; it is understandable, if tragic, that poor Québecois Catholics feared inoculation more than they feared smallpox, because modern medicine was able to offer effective preventative and containment measures in Jenner's procedure and in hospital-or home-based quarantine.The second chapter shows how in his career at McGill, Johns Hopkins, and Oxford Universities, William Osler made lasting institutional and knowledge connections in the fields of medicine and medical education between Canada, its southern neighbor, and its imperial head across the ocean.Moreover, he encouraged Cushing's therapeutic advances in the surgical treatment of trigeminal neuralgia, brain cancer, and pituitary tumors.At last, physicians had real cures for some of their patients' conditions.It took until 1922 for internal
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".