A Critical Assessment of the Oral Condition of the Crew of the Franklin Expedition + Supplementary Appendix 1 (See Article Tools)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Little is known about the fate of the crew of the Franklin expedition after they sailed from England in 1845. Scant physical evidence and limited Inuit testimony have fueled speculation that the crew had scurvy, had been poisoned by lead, or had botulism or tuberculosis. The Schwatka expedition (1878 – 80) documented that several Inuit families had observed sailors of the Franklin expedition dragging ship’s boats in Washington Bay on the southwest coast of King William Island, Nunavut, Canada. The Inuit reported that the men appeared thin and the mouths of some of them were hard, dry, and black. Many Franklin scholars believe from this description that the surviving crews were suffering from scurvy and possibly lead poisoning. Using a systematic review of the medical literature to assess the Inuit testimony, we reviewed 1718 citations. With this approach, we identified a new and plausible explanation for the wasting and oral conditions ascribed to some of the survivors. We believe that miliary tuberculosis resulting in adrenal insufficiency (or Addison’s disease) may have resulted in the oral and physical symptoms witnessed by the Inuit. Scurvy and lead exposure may have contributed to the pathogenesis of Addison’s disease, but the hypothesis is not wholly dependent on these conditions. The tuberculosis-Addison’s hypothesis results in a deeper understanding of one of the greatest mysteries of Arctic exploration.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.073 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.117 | 0.007 |
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".