“If We Can Make a Cure of Him”: Lyrical Grenfell in the St. Anthony Casebooks, 1906
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Narrative-based physician records contain much more than observerless data and diagnoses. Indeed, a “case,” the basic currency of medical communication, can be seen as a literary genre, much like a novel or a poem, and given close readings for author voice, tradition, and influences. In this article, I describe my initial encounter with Dr. Wilfred Grenfell’s casebooks in a hospital basement in St. Anthony, Newfoundland and Labrador, and my subsequent engagement with them as both a physician and a poet. Adopting Bleakley and Marshall’s definition of medical lyricism as the impulse that “draws our attention to delicacy, tenderness and the joyous, and to verve, desire, eroticism, the fecund, abundance and generation,” I argue that Grenfell’s approach to medicine in early 20th-century Newfoundland and Labrador was both a product of his scientific training and his enculturation at the end of the Victorian period.
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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".