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Record W4297996082 · doi:10.3138/cjhh.2022-554-122021

Aconite in Victorian Tropical Toxicology

2022· article· en· W4297996082 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Journal of Health History · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics
TopicPlant-based Medicinal Research
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsColonialismRoot (linguistics)AdventureHistorySign (mathematics)Traditional medicineAncient historyLiteratureArtPhilosophyArt historyMedicineArchaeology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Beginning as a symptomatic reading of Arthur Conan Doyle’s use of a fictional African root poison, the Radix pedis diaboli, in “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” (1907), and Indian poisoned darts in The Sign of the Four (1890), this article makes some general comments on the history of colonial tropical toxicology, focusing on the Indian aconite ( Aconitum ferox) and its roots ( Radix aconiti indica). Arguably, Doyle had aconite in his mind while creating the fictional African root poison. Victorian toxicologists, who were deeply interested in Indian poisons, created stereotypes of India as congeries of melancholy and culturally backward, industrially primitive, and morally corrupt societies. Doyle’s fictional poisons were influenced by a normative cultural bias that saw tropical pharmakons like aconite with an Orientalizing gaze. By shifting the geographical focus from Doyle’s “Ubangi country” to nineteenth-century India, I draw attention to a larger spectrum of tropical toxicology. The colonial zeal to taxonomize the properties and utility of tropical pharmakons obsessively revolved around their toxic uses as criminal weapons or accidental killers, while marginalizing the medicinal uses that the plant had been historically put to by ancient Indian physicians.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesResearch integrity, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.181
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0100.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.207
GPT teacher head0.451
Teacher spread0.244 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it