The “Human Subject,” “Vulnerable Populations,” and Medical History: The Problem of Presentism and the Discourse of Bioethics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This discussion considers recent historical works of eugenics and sterilization in Canada, but it is not an historiographic review essay or critique per se of this literature. Rather, by focussing on the topic of historic diagnostic categories such as "feeble-minded," "idiot," and "moron," methodological issues such as historical presentism and its possible interactions with the discourse of modern bioethics are examined. The conclusions derived are meant only to be cautionary, and are neither prescriptive nor proscriptive. Medical historians undertaking analyses of currently contentious topics that may directly involve or indirectly allude to "human subjects" or "vulnerable populations" perhaps ought to reflect on the degree, if any, they may be anachronistically writing contemporary bioethical categories into bygone eras.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.147 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".