“You Had To Just Kind Of Rub Her Cheek”: Memories and Emotions of Mental Deficiency Nurses in Alberta, Canada, 1945 - 1975
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mental deficiency nursing evolved as a distinct, yet little known field of nursing education and practice in several countries during the twentieth century. In Canada it became a separate area of nursing in only one of its provinces, Alberta, and it was tied to one large institution, called the Provincial Training School for the care of developmentally disabled children and, eventually, also adults. This paper contributes to the history of mental deficiency nursing, currently called intellectual disability nursing, an existing specialty actively practiced in the UK and Ireland for example. Alberta’s program was established in 1933 and continued until 1973. I examine this history through the lens of three mental deficiency nurses’ experiences of their education and work at the institution shared in an oral history interview. These nurses worked in the institution in the period after the Second World War. Their stories provide a unique perspective on a field of nursing work and education that grew increasingly controversial during the latter half of the 20th century when public debate arose over the institutionalization of people with developmental disability. Moreover, the institution’s entanglement within an active eugenics policy and practice maintained in the province of Alberta until 1972 added to the controversy. Their stories provide insight in the perceptions and emotions of mental deficiency nurses, experienced and remembered some sixty years later in an interview. I examine how the nurses took up this work and how their professional identity was depicted and changed, especially as public debate arose from the 1970s onward. The stories provide a unique micro-historical lens to explore larger social and cultural tensions over eugenics, disability, care and dependency, and over mental deficiency nurses’ work.
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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.051 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| 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".