“A Vile Custom”: The Strange Career of William Osler’s “Professional Notes”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1882, William Osler wrote "Professional Notes among the Indian Tribes about Great Slave Lake, NWT," a fantastical essay that purportedly described the sexual and obstetric customs of Indigenous peoples residing in the Canadian Northwest. Originally prepared as a prank, "Professional Notes," along with Osler's alter ego Egerton Yorrick Davis, became an elaborate inside joke that circulated widely among the medical elite for decades after Osler's death. In this essay, I trace the history and afterlife of "Professional Notes," considering both the colonial context of its creation as well as the reasons for its enduring popularity. I argue that "Professional Notes" both reflected and reinforced the anti-Indigenous racism that permeated the medical profession, particularly during its consolidation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I also make a methodological argument for the study of joking within the history of medicine, presenting "Professional Notes" as a powerful example of the role humour has played in shaping medical culture.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 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".