Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2018, demands to remove a statue of James Marion Sims – the inventor of the vaginal speculum and a number of revolutionary surgical techniques – continue a recent trend that has seen a re-evaluation of the legacy of the man known as the “father of gynecology” as well as other historical figures. His innovations, which revolutionized women’s surgical care, came as the result of horrific experimentation on slave women. Despite the availability of anaesthetic agents, he used none during his experiments. One of his subjects was operated on thirty times. Beginning in the late 20th century, revisionist historians started to draw attention to his unethical and inhumane experiments and have begun to view him not as a medical pioneer but as an oppressor. However, in textbooks as well as in the academic literature, the medical community continues to hold a predominantly positive and uncritical view of Sims and his experiments. In this paper, a brief history of Sims’ surgical experiments and contributions to gynecology is described. His surgical legacy is discussed, and contemporaneous and modern reactions to his experiments are compared. Finally, a brief discussion of the relevance of historical mistreatment on the healthcare of vulnerable populations is provided.
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 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 | 0.007 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 0.008 |
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".