“The Massacre of the Tonsil”: Tonsillectomies and Medical Malpractice in Mid-20<sup>th</sup>-Century Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tonsillectomy was one of the most common surgeries in Canada in the mid-twentieth century. Tonsils received blame for many health problems, and advocates of the tonsillectomy said it was an important form of preventative medicine. However, like all surgeries, the procedure came with dangers. Only a small percentage of patients - most of whom were children - suffered injuries or died, but the large number of tonsillectomies meant that a substantial number of people experienced adverse outcomes. Plaintiffs who sued for medical malpractice faced a tort law system that made it extremely difficult to secure compensation. So long as the procedure was carried out with an ordinary level of skill and care, no compensation was typically available. This paper shows how Canadian law facilitated the use of tonsillectomy, and, in doing so, highlights the need to consider the role of judge-made law in the history of medicine.
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".