Elder Dempster and the transport of lunatics in British West Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter examines the role that Elder Dempster played in transporting so-called ‘lunatics’ between the United Kingdom and British West African colonies in the first half of the twentieth century. Many Europeans inhabiting the colonies and many more colonial subjects traveling abroad in the UK and other West African territories succumbed to mental illnesses while far from home. When this occurred and the patient was deemed likely to benefit from repatriation, Elder Dempster was typically the agent charged with providing transport. As such, Elder Dempster frequently had to negotiate with the Colonial Office about the practicalities of transporting lunatics. The cost of transport and who was to pay, the types of accommodations necessary for mentally ill passengers, and considerations of liability all had to be orchestrated to the satisfaction of the commercial shipping giant. This chapter argues that the relationship between Elder Dempster and the British government represents an example of the importance of public-private cooperation in the maintenance of the medical geography of Empire, even as it reveals significant tensions underlying such cooperation. In so doing, it helps to move the historical study of psychiatry in colonial Africa into a broader engagement with its international, transnational and commercial influences.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".