Tempting the Nation: Imperial Belonging and the Politics of Venereal Disease in Canada?s Great War, 1914-1920
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Tempting the Nation: Imperial Belonging and the Politics of Venereal Disease in Canada’s Great War, 1914-1920,” examines the moral and medical conflicts over the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases in the United Kingdom to tell a new political history of the British Empire in the First World War. Examining conflicts between Canadian, dominion, and British authorities over the effects of venereal infections in the UK on military preparedness reveals the interpenetration of medical, military, and political history at a key moment in global history where eugenic thought directly influenced decision-making processes. Drawing from archives in Canada and the United Kingdom, the project uses military and medical correspondence, court documents, the minutes of the Royal Commissions on Venereal Disease (1913-16 and 1918), and women’s’ newspapers from across the political spectrum to reveal how wartime pressures turned the treatment of medical issues into matters of grave geopolitical importance. “Tempting the Nation” emphasizes how wartime circumstances of geographical proximity and necessary, if temporary, co-governance exacerbated tensions between British and Canadian authorities over venereal disease rates in the metropole. It argues that these had long term effects for both Canadians and British people, including during the period of demobilization and the writing of peace treaties, with implications for postwar developments in the Dominions and the development of the Commonwealth. Foregrounding local interactions makes clear the ways that larger questions of national and imperial identity were at stake in efforts to control sexually transmitted disease. Disagreements between British and Canadian authorities in the UK over the eruption of syphilis within Canadian troops stationed in the United Kingdom and local women’s roles in venereal disease transmission led to intra-imperial conflicts with local, regional, and transatlantic stakes. Particular moments, like the imposition of Defense of the Realm Act regulation 40D, show how the longer histories of sexual regulation and the legacies of the Contagious Diseases Acts shaped the wartime experience of public health in the United Kingdom. Thus, this dissertation demonstrates that the global history of sexual regulation and the regulation of women’s bodies in the name of public health are integral to understanding the longer history of imperial and Dominion political relations.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".