“Forgers of Falsehood, Physicians of Nought”: Retailing Fictions in Boccaccio’s <i>Decameron</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whereas Petrarch’s portrait of his doctor in Invectives Against a Physician is deliberately caricatural and seized at a glance, Boccaccio’s attitude towards doctors in the Decameron is far harder to grasp and easily overlooked. Yet, doctors and medical science are a central concern of the Decameron, whose first significant action (the brigata’s movement from the plague-afflicted city to the countryside) and activity (storytelling) are predicated on the Florentine doctors’ failure to find a remedy for the plague. Throughout the Decameron, the doctors’ glaring incapacity to help their patients is implicitly contrasted with the poets’ success in offering some measure of solace—if not a definitive cure—to those afflicted by the plague. The conventional view that poets retail fictions, and doctors, real cures, is repeatedly cast into doubt as Boccaccio reveals that all too often the real difference between doctors and poets is that doctors hawk medical fictions (their arsenal of exotic powders and decoctions) as true cures, whereas poets cloak true cures in poetic fictions. Medical fictions sicken the healthy and kill the sick; poetic fictions quicken the spirit and promote life. This counterpoising of doctors and poets (or painters), medicine and fiction in the Decameron both anticipates and contributes to Boccaccio’s lifelong defense of poetry that culminates in the 14th and 15th books of the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.002 | 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 teacher head, 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".