The Tyranny of Distance: The Treatment and Prevention of Diphtheria in Middle Canada, 1894-1920
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Before 1900, diphtheria was a deadly infection in Canadian children. Clinical trials in Europe demonstrated that "antitoxin" decreased mortality of the disease. Canadian physicians first utilized the new medication in 1894 and found it most efficacious when administered early in the illness. Two factors hindered the widespread application of the new medication. Imported antitoxin was expensive, and physicians frequently purchased it themselves rather than let their patients expire. In 1916, Connaught Laboratories in Toronto began domestic production of antitoxin, and provincial governments eventually provided access to the life-saving medication for all citizens. The vast distances between families and physicians in rural districts also made it impossible to access the antitoxin before sick children were beyond hope. During the 1920s, a public health program began to actually prevent diphtheria. Ten years of experience in many regions demonstrated the efficacy of immunization as mortality from diphtheria declined to almost zero.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".