Cultural sutures: medicine and media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cultural Sutures: Medicine and Media. Lester D. Friedman, ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 452 pp. $89.95 hbk. $24.95 pbk. At least from time of Hippocrates in fifth century B.C., practitioners of medicine have passed on their knowledge and, at times, ignorance through both oral and written word. Now in twenty-first century, medicine has spread through popular culture and has found its way into print, advertisements, fiction films, television, documentaries, and computers. These six media constitute six sections of Lester Friedman's compendium of twenty-one articles and essays about medicine and media. The hefty 452-page volume includes an introduction by Friedman, who has a joint senior appointment in Program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics (Feinberg School of Medicine) and Department of Radio/TV/Film (School of Communication) at Northwestern University. Medicine, it seems, has replaced baseball as our national pastime, writes Friedman. Many of essays lend credence to that barely hyperbolic statement. The most compelling article in anthology is Reproductive Freedom, Revisionist History, Restricted Freedom: The Strange Case of Margaret Sanger and Birth by Martin F. Norden, professor of communication at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The article features an analysis of Margaret Sanger's controversial 1917 feature-length film, Birth Control, which is presumed lost. Norden integrates old journalistic and legal materials with a written scene-by-scene description of Birth Control discovered at Smith College's Sophia Smith Archive. The story of conflict between early American birth control advocate, Sanger, and forces pushing sexual repression is chilling, especially in light of recent movement of Christian fundamentalists toward denying women's reproductive rights. Following a similar line of societal forces suppressing straight talk about sex is essay Continence of Continent: The Ideology of Disease and Hygiene in World War II Training Films by Christie Milliken, assistant professor in Department of Communications, Popular Culture, and Film at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. These two articles about documentary films and medicine are excellent. The same cannot be said for section on television, which focuses on popular television dramas rather than more ubiquitous medical television news coverage. Dissecting Doctor Shows: A Content Analysis of ER and Chicago by Gregory Makoul and Lior Peer, both from Northwestern University, sheds little light on impact of medical dramas. Rather, authors pursue a framing analysis that comes up with conclusion that the frames operating on both ER and Chicago Hope are that medicine is drama, doctors are human, and patients are trouble or troubled. …
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.005 |
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".