More About Moore: The Celebrated Worm Doctor and his Practice in London, 1699–1737
Bibliographic record
Abstract
John Moore (d. April 1737), apothecary, is probably best known as the retailer of powders and ointments for treating tapeworm and other worm infections, which he advertised in London papers with formulaic attestations by satisfied customers and announcements of worms of sensational size and conformation. One such ad, for example, informs readers of the worms ‘to be seen at the said Mr Moor’s, viz. one 30 Foot long, another 5 and an half, being part of one of 16 Yards odd Inches; another 6 Yards and half, another 50 Foot, and another in form of a Bird, but very small’.1 If Moore’s fame did not arise singlehandedly from his own prodigious volume of peculiar and graphic advertisements, it was undoubtedly enhanced by the publication of satires such as Alexander Pope’s ballad To the Ingenious Mr Moore, Author of the Celebrated Worm-Powder (1716). No doubt readers could locate precisely where Moore vended his medicines. We know considerably less today: that his shop the Pestle and Mortar in Abchurch Lane by 1736 moved to Laurence Pountney Lane, on the left-hand side going south from Cannon Street.2 Little else has been discovered about the man the Scriblerians loved to mock.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.059 | 0.016 |
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".