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Record W4413879464 · doi:10.1093/shm/hkaf067

Dan Healey <i>The Gulag Doctors: Life, Death, and Medicine in Stalin’s Labour Camps</i>

2025· article· en· W4413879464 on OpenAlexaff
Wilson T. Bell

Bibliographic record

VenueSocial History of Medicine · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicHistory of Science and Medicine
Canadian institutionsThompson Rivers University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGulagMedicineHistoryArtPolitical scienceLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Dan Healey's well-researched Gulag Doctors is a crucially important contribution to the history of the Gulag and to the history of medicine within coercive institutions. Healey situates his discussion as a counterpoint to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's generalization that Gulag medicine was part of the dehumanizing process leading to mass death. Instead, Healey focuses on individual personnel to highlight Gulag medicine as a “grey zone” (p. 33) in which some doctors and medical staff did their best to help prisoners, others sought to advance their careers, and still others tried just to do their jobs and maintain a low profile. As he notes in his conclusion, “The Gulag hospital could be a place of healing, compassion, and learning, while often simultaneously a portal to death after penal malnutrition, exhaustion, and systemic neglect” (p. 256). In sum, Healey examines the very human responses to working (sometimes by choice, sometimes not) within a very inhumane system.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.007
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.982
Threshold uncertainty score0.147

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.007
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0180.010
Scholarly communication0.0080.006
Open science0.0010.005
Research integrity0.0080.013
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0150.002

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.

Opus teacher head0.040
GPT teacher head0.276
Teacher spread0.237 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreReview

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractno

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