Greta Jones, ‘Doctors for Export’: Medical Migration from Ireland c. 1860 to 1960
Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘Doctors for Export’ by Greta Jones is a contribution not only to the history of medicine in Ireland but also to a history of medical migration and professional migration more broadly. Jones explores how Irish medical education was historically structured around the assumption that medical graduates would seek employment elsewhere and what the effects of this policy were for physicians, for Ireland and the target countries, and for the process of medical professionalization. The book stays tightly focused on professional, institutional, and organizational questions, situating them within the historical context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland. Jones covers a wide range of topics within this tight focus, moving back and forth between straightforward social history and prosopography to present both the structures facilitating or limiting medical migration and the problems and circumstances that individual physicians experienced. The first few chapters focus on the situation in Ireland that made migration a desirable (or necessary) option for Irish physicians. Ireland had several medical schools, a result of religious divisions that saw Catholics and Protestants largely attending separate universities. The structure of practitioner employment in hospitals, asylums, and Poor Law and dispensary positions was similar to that of Britain — unsurprising, since Ireland was under British governance — but with fewer opportunities due to the poorer economic position of the country. As Jones shows, this combination of more medical graduates per capita, fewer employment opportunities, and lower incomes in Ireland than in Britain formed the basis for medical migration as the choice of individuals and as the strategy of educational institutions and professional organizations. The overproduction of doctors, Jones concludes, was built into Irish medical culture (p. 38). Decisions to migrate were often based on the need to make a medical living, but the money these migrants earned and the status that went with the profession allowed them to support their Irish families from abroad and contributed to the stabilization of an Irish professional middle class.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.008 |
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".