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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
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 teacher head, 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".