Reassessing the pauper burial: the disposal of corpses in nineteenth-century Brussels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I examine the changing disposal of pauper corpses in the nineteenth-century hospitals of Brussels. I argue that the end of the century witnessed a growing focus on the individuality of the pauper corpse. Research into hospital records has revealed the significance of the ideological struggles between Catholics, liberals and socialists from the 1860s onwards, as a result of which the indifferent attitude of hospital administrators regarding dead patients and relatives was increasingly contested. Acts and complaints by the local authorities, mutualist burial societies and relatives brought about improvements in the material conditions of the pauper burial. My analysis of this debate shows that the ideological conflicts regarding Catholic and civil burials, as well as the introduction of new burial standards within hospitals, led to a greater emphasis on the burial desires of the dead. Yet, I argue that this attention towards the individual pauper corpse was only deemed necessary if close family members or burial societies stood up for the fulfilment of the dying wishes of the dead. Poor hospital patients without such social relationships could not prevent an anonymous anatomy burial.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".