“The Parent of Health and Long Life”. Food and the Popularization of Learned Medicine in Late-seventeenth-century England
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although newer approaches, including the Paracelsian one, also started to gain more prominence, late-seventeenth-century medicine was still largely based upon the Hippocratic-Galenic system, where the relationship between nutrition, health and well-being occupied a prominent position. Indeed, food was included among Galen’s six “non-naturals”, that is, the activities that need to be regulated to balance the humors in the body and, consequently, to preserve (and in some cases also restore) health. Moreover, the distinction between food and drug was only pragmatic, as, because of their therapeutic properties, several kinds of foodstuff also appear among the simples and in the ingredients lists of compound remedies in all materia medica and receptaria. Following the methodology of Historical Discourse Analysis, the paper investigates how the relationship between food and well-being was presented and represented in a corpus of general medical handbooks that were translated from Latin into English in the late seventeenth century with the purpose of rendering learned medical notions accessible to a wider English-speaking audience, thus shedding light on dominant discourses on food and nutrition and their role in the promotion of well-being in early modern 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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".