Jeremy A. Greene, Flurin Condrau, and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, eds. Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1922, fourteen-year-old diabetic Leonard Thompson received the first injections of insulin at Toronto General Hospital. The medication was life-saving and meant that juvenile diabetes (now called type-1 diabetes) was no longer a death sentence. As long as patients had access to insulin, they could live relatively normal, healthy lives. A genuine therapeutic revolution, perhaps. Yet, a century later, rates of type-2 diabetes have mushroomed and now constitute ninety percent of diabetes cases. Try as they might, pharmaceutical companies have no magic bullet for type-2 diabetes, leaving lifestyle adjustments as the primary intervention. So, what story is the most telling? Which narrative conveys most about how to tackle disease in the twenty-first century? These are just some of the themes explored in Therapeutic Revolutions, a compelling attempt to unpack exactly what has been revolutionary about modern medicine. The volume’s chapters combine history, anthropology, sociology, and science studies, including a number of contributors who work at the intersection of medicine and social science. At a time when the term “interdisciplinary” is wheeled out in academia almost as often as the term “revolutionary,” the editors should be commended for putting together a volume that is much more than the sum of its parts. In that spirit, rather than commenting on each chapter, I will focus on some of the book’s key themes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".