Descriptions of intestinal worms in European medieval medical texts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article investigates medieval medical texts to discover what they have to say about parasites. The principal focus is on intestinal worms found in practica texts written from the 11th to the 15th centuries in Latin in Western Europe. Practica texts deal with illnesses of the human body from head to heel. The chapters on worms occur in discussion of illnesses of the intestines. These practica texts were used in medical education in universities as well as guiding medical practice. Islamicate writings translated from Arabic into Latin influenced western ideas about intestinal worms. Practica texts identify 3 or 4 kinds of intestinal worm depending on size and shape. They are thought to be generated in different parts of the intestine and rectum. Worms are made from matter associated with the humour phlegm which is cold and wet and putrefaction within the body gives life to them. Other parasites of the human body are found close to the skin surface but resemble intestinal worms in the ways they are generated. Areas of argument and dispute arose in learned medical literature. These arguments did not introduce new concepts or research findings but built on analysis of the doctrines of ancient and Islamicate writers. While humoral imbalance is understood to cause worms, recipes from the treatment section usually emphasize the aim of killing and expelling the worms from the body using bitter ingredients like Absinthium (wormwood).
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".