Horst Oertel and the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology: Impacts on vital statistics and the origins of the short‐lived heyday of autopsies in America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Horst Oertel was an early 20th century pathologist who began his career as an instructor of clinical pathology at the New York University and Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1899. In 1903, he was appointed pathologist for City Hospital, an institution for indigent patients on New York City's Blackwell's Island. In 1907, Oertel became the first director of the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology, a unique new blended public-private entity based at City Hospital, that was named after a wealthy benefactor. The Institute was established to utilize the Island's indigent population to perform anatomical pathology research on diseases of aging. Oertel and the Institute thrived until 1911, when a newly-appointed New York City bureaucrat seeking patronage and graft began meddling in the Institute's governance. After press coverage of a vitriolic one-week-long exchange of charges and counter-charges between the Institute's Board of Directors and the bureaucrat, the Institute imploded. While these events meant that the Institute's tenure on Blackwell's Island would soon be coming to an end, Oertel continued to work and submit articles from the Institute throughout 1912. In May 1913, he published "The Inaccuracy of American Mortality Statistics" in American Underwriter, a bombshell article documenting low autopsy rates and high clinical diagnostic error rates at Bellevue Hospital during 1912. This, along with similar studies by Richard Cabot at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, highlighted fundamental problems in hospital care and medical education across America. Simultaneously, Oertel led the Public Health, Hospital and Budget Committee of the New York Academy of Medicine which reported that, in a selected series of large American hospitals, the autopsy percentage when compared to the number of deaths was one-eighth the rates in Canada, Great Britain, Austria, and Germany. This paper addresses how American autopsy rates skyrocketed and then plummeted again during the mid-20th century.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".