Mercier’s Clinic: Public Health Utopianism in <i>L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The eighteenth-century medical Enlightenment in France saw fierce conflicts between inoculistes and anti-inoculistes, attacks from philosophes and surgeons on the privileges and dogmas of elite academic doctors, and attempts by reformers to improve medicine, hospitals, and sanitation. In this article, I show that Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (1771) intervenes in this debate by portraying a France experiencing a public health crisis and providing compassionate remedies in a futuristic “public health utopia” for the diseases of France’s individual and political bodies, including a proposal for a new inoculation clinic. Mercier’s novel is the first French biopolitical novel, assigning responsibility for health and medicine to the state; it is also technocratic and sometimes anti-populist, and it aims to suppress as much as resolve social antagonisms on the eve of the French Revolution. I argue that Mercier’s view of the state’s role in public health is closer to physiocratic than republican or liberal positions, and affirms several characteristics of the absolutist tradition.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".