A ‘prodigious latitude’ of words: vocabularies of illness in 18th-century medical treatises and women’s writing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In its examination of a selection of 18th-century medical treatises and women's writing, this essay considers a range of context-specific and historically specific medical vocabularies and tries to illuminate the various linguistic registers of physicians' and women's understandings and experiences of physio-emotional illness. In a preprofessionalised world in which medical and literary cultures overlapped significantly and medical knowledge was not yet restricted to a group of formally trained male elites, vocabularies of illness abounded, oftentimes moving freely between the permeable disciplinary boundaries of the age. Physician writers, in their efforts to define and label the cluster of related conditions commonly known as spleen, vapours, melancholy, or hypochondriacal and hysterical affliction, often operated on a principle of humility, embracing uncertainty, admitting fault and assuming a willingness to question their own assumptions. They recognised that elusive processes were at the heart of these conditions, which came with a vast amalgam of physical and psychological symptoms, as well as a long list of possible designations. For their part, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Lynch Piozzi, Elizabeth Carter, Mary Leapor, Elizabeth Tollet, Anna Seward and Susanna Blamire interpreted with a keen eye the medical information available to them, deployed the plethora of words at their disposal and created their own vocabularies of illness. As they formulated a productively unstable, fluctuating lexicon to conceptualise and define spleen and its analogous conditions, these women writers came up with new words and inventive metonyms, and drew at once on the language of medicine, social and domestic inequality, and the natural world to capture experiences of suffering.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".