Disputing Epidemics, Public Health, and Alternative Therapies in Latin American History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay reviews the following works: The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America. Edited by Diego Armus and Pablo F. Gómez. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021. Pp. 262. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780822946854. Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain. By Paula S. De Vos. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. Pp. xiv + 352. $50.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780822946496. For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala. By Martha Few. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015. Pp. x + 304. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780816531875. The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. By Pablo F. Gómez. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xix + 314. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781469630878. Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History. By Kyle Harper. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. x + 704. $35.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780691192123. Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico, 1800–1870. By Luz María Hernández Sáenz. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018. Pp. xix + 376. $38.22 paperback. ISBN: 9780773553026. Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason. By Paul Ramírez. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Pp. xi + 376. $70.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781503604339. Mexico in the Time of Cholera. By Donald Fithian Stevens. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 328. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780826360557. An Imperative to Cure: Principles and Practice of Q’eqchi’ Maya Medicine in Belize. By James B. Waldram. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020. Pp. xvi + 288. $84.80 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826361738. Death Is All around Us: Corpses, Chaos, and Public Health in Porfirian Mexico City. By Jonathan M. Weber. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Pp. xiii + 294. $30.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781496213440.
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 | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".