Containing Disease and Disaster: The Role of Hôtel Dieu of Montreal during the Smallpox Outbreak, 1885
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1885 an outbreak of smallpox threatened the health of Montreal citizens. This prompted Montreal and Quebec health officials to implement a plan of action to contain the disease and ward off disaster. Ideally the health officials intended on reopening quarantine centres located throughout the city, however, these facilities were not ready to service the outbreak. The quarantine facilities required medical equipment and supplies as well as the staff necessary to oversee patient care; neither of which could be re-established within the small window of opportunity health officials had to intervene. Their alternative solution was to convert Hôtel Dieu of Montreal from a general hospital to a specialized smallpox facility. This decision resulted in Hôtel Dieu transferring all patients who still required medical attention, but did not exhibit smallpox symptoms to other hospitals; while allowing the remaining patients to rejoin the general public. The decision to transfer or release all unrelated smallpox cases had serious implications, contributing to 9600 people contracting the virus as well as the death of 3234 Montrealers. It was apparent that the virus had been seeded throughout the city on account of the health official’s actions, but what was more troubling is that their actions indicate that they went against popular medical practices which would dictate against the transfer or release of patients. So the question remains, why did the health officials choose the course of action they did?
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".