Politics, patronage and scandal at the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, 1848-1857
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the mid-nineteenth century, Canada West’s Provincial Lunatic Asylum sat at the heart of a system of patronage. It was this system of patronage that allowed the politician John Rolph to secure the position of Asylum Medical Superintendent for his protégé, Dr. Joseph Workman. However, this same period also witnessed the beginning of a shift away from patronage-based appointments towards a new style of civil service characterized by expertise rather than political or personal connections. Among those who supported this new ideal was the politician and journalist George Brown, who heavily criticized Workman’s appointment as an example of political patronage. Yet, the antagonism that continued to escalate between Brown and Workman owed its genesis not only to Brown’s ideals, but was also fueled by the considerations of party factionalism as well as by the clash of two strong personalities. Their feud would reach its climax in the heavily publicized 1857 libel suit, Workman v. Brown. Sharing a common devotion to the Reform party and to lunacy reform, an examination of the feud between Brown and Workman reveals the many schisms that could divide Reformers during this period.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".