Janet Weston, Looking after Miss Alexander: Care, Mental Capacity, and the Court of Protection in Mid-Twentieth-Century England
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For many years, Miss Beatrice Ruth Alexander (1878–1969) was housekeeper to Dr John Norton, a general practitioner. He died in 1934 and bequeathed her an ample pension and his house for the duration of her life. In 1939, local people were concerned that Dr Norton’s former gardener and cook, Mr and Mrs Humphries, a ‘family of ill repute’, had moved into the house ‘and seemed to exercise considerable control over her money and movements’, what today might be construed as financial and emotional abuse. Regarded as vulnerable and unable to deal with her own affairs, Looking after Miss Alexander explores how her life was managed over the next 30 years. The narrative raises issues of the balance between care and control. Cultural contexts and personal perspectives affect how care and control are conceptualised. Control is usually framed negatively and care positively, but they can coexist, such as with vehicle safety belts, speed limits and road safety, or in healthcare when treating a disturbed patient. Regarding disturbed mental function, in the interwar years, the law about depriving a person of their liberty by detention in a mental hospital preoccupied the general public more than depriving them of the right to manage their financial affairs.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.004 |
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".