Entre secours et guerison: les enfants de la polio a Montreal vus par les philanthropes, 1930-1955
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cet article propose une analyse de la perception sociale des enfants handicapés au Québec entre 1930 et 1950, décennies frappées par des épidémies successives de poliomyélite. À travers l’examen des archives d’une association montréalaise visant à secourir les « enfants infirmes », l’étude démontre que la perception des enfants de la polio est fortement teintée par une idéologie de la guérison qui insiste sur leur redressement physique et moral. Afin de convaincre le public de se montrer généreux, les organisateurs des campagnes de souscription mettent l’accent sur la vulnérabilité de leurs protégés et dépeignent une image sentimentale des bambins. Les fillettes, conceptualisées comme fragiles, incarnent cette représentation de la victime méritante par excellence, plus encore que les garçons. Une logique paternaliste de protection et d’assistance se dégage de la plupart du matériel publicitaire et des documents publiés par la Société de secours. L’organisme se positionne clairement en protecteur des enfants auxquels il vient en aide, parfois même en cherchant à les soustraire à l’ignorance de leurs parents. Une vision plus pragmatique est aussi partagée par les bienfaiteurs puisqu’ils perçoivent leurs protégés comme des « ressources humaines », de futurs citoyens dont l’avenir ne saurait être hypothéqué. La société québécoise ne peut se permettre de gaspiller ce capital humain, c’est pourquoi les philanthropes veulent sauver le joyau de la nation : ses enfants. This article proposes an analysis of the social perception of disabled children in Quebec between 1930 and 1950, decades hit by successive epidemics of poliomyelitis. Through the study of the archives of the Quebec Society for Crippled Children, this paper shows that the image of «polio children» was influenced by an ideology of cure which assets that they can be straightened physically and morally. In order to convince the public to be generous, the organizers of the subscription campaigns emphasize about the vulnerability of their protégés and depict a sentimental image of the toddlers. The girls, conceptualized as fragile, embody par excellence this representation of deserving victim, even more than boys. A paternalistic logic of protection and assistance emanates from most advertising material and documents published by the philanthropic association. The organization is clearly positioned as a protector of the children to whom it helps, sometimes even trying to keep them from the ignorance of their parents. A more pragmatic vision is also shared by the benefactors as they perceive their protégés as "human resources", future citizens whose future cannot be compromised. Quebec society can not afford to waste this human capital, which is why philanthropists want to save the treasure of the nation: its children.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".