Mind matters: Psychosurgical horror in The Great God Pan and Peter and Wendy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article locates a connection between Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy beyond the texts’ focus on the mythic and malevolent Pagan god. Both Machen and Barrie express interest in the brain as a physiological region that can be explored, mapped and manipulated. This interest, I argue, emerges from late-nineteenth-century neurological experiments, especially the psychosurgical procedures performed by Gottfried Burckhardt in the 1880s. Although Burckhardt’s operations were widely criticized, and his results generally discredited, the practice of psychosurgery continued to be debated in medical communities. In The Great God Pan and Peter and Wendy, forms of psychosurgery unleash murderous monstrosities, thus implicating, to varying degrees, Dr Raymond and Mrs Darling, the surgeons of this horror.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| 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".