Delight or Disgust? The Afterlife of Anatomical Waxworks
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How do we display the uncanny? During the Second World War the medical school of Queen’s University (Canada) commissioned artist Marjorie Winslow to make a series of wax teaching models to illustrate childbirth, in three dimensions, for the benefit of medical students. How have curators displayed these obstetric waxworks, which provoke strong feelings of disgust or of horrified empathy? Even in storage in the Museum of Healthcare at Kingston, the Winslow waxworks remain concealed behind a curtain, and when they are on display, they are now far more likely to be part of in an art exhibition than a medical history display. This paper uses the early history of obstetric waxworks and their display in eighteenth-century Italy to show how medical waxworks have always challenged the disciplinary divide between art and science. This historical context informs our understanding of the display history of the Winslow waxworks and of uncanny objects in general.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 it