Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reverends Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, founders of the Free African Society, worked as and recruited Black nurses during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia at the behest of white medical and political leaders who falsely claimed the disease did not affect Black persons. In a coauthored pamphlet published just months after the epidemic, Jones and Allen intervened in the medical and print discourses of their day to correct narratives of immunity that cultured Black persons’ deaths as ungrievable and to fight back against printed accounts of “extortion” by Black nurses that threatened to further entrench systemic notions of Black violability and disposability. Their protest pamphlet challenges structural violence and demands abolition, arguments that still inform our thinking about racism, health, and justice today. Jones and Allen’s pamphlet, perhaps the first text copyrighted by African Americans, challenged the racialized “science” and writing of leading physicians and journalists, including Dr. Benjamin Rush and printer Mathew Carey. It critiqued not only the era’s science but also its capitalistic practices that both championed the enslavement of Black persons and denied free Black medical workers fair pay, even as white people would not perform such work. Jones and Allen engage with discourses of blood, bloodletting, and bloodshed to link their medical work with the revolution then taking place in Haiti. Using such imagery, they diagnose the American body politic as ill and in need of bleeding. A look to 1793’s yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia – and Black nurses’ response to it – sheds light on the failings of the United States to contain COVID-19 and to protect its Black citizens, medical professionals and laypersons alike, in the face of white supremacy and yet another deadly virus more than two hundred years later.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".