Healing Body and Soul in Labrador: The Practice of Medicine by Early Moravian Missionaries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This article considers sickness and health within the context of intercultural encounter. The focus is on Moravian medical practitioners and the cure of diseases in eighteenth-century Labrador. Data is taken from the earliest Nain diaries, additional Moravian manuscripts, and ethnographic studies. An examination of Moravian healing techniques and their appreciation by the indigenous population shows that Inuit judged the missionaries’ practices in accordance with their own beliefs and incorporated them into their traditional healing system. Pietists’ holistic methods, which included the treatment of the patient’s soul together with his body, corresponded with the Inuit’s conviction that most physical ailments arose from a moral cause (violation of taboo). Despite the Moravians’ hope of the persuasiveness of their cures, the success of their medical procedures—invariably attributed to the healing force of the Savior—did not convince Inuit to abandon their allegiance to the spirits and convert to Christianity. They continued to call on the angakkuit (shamans) for help and followed their instructions alongside of the brethren’s medical treatments. The consulted primary sources also suggest that shamans only resorted to the missionaries’ cures in life-threatening situations.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".