Contagion by Conceit: Menstruosity and the Rhetoric of Smallpox into the Age of Inoculation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An incident towards the close of Sarah Fielding’s sentimental novel The Adventures of David Simple (1753) raises questions central to the concerns of this volume regarding how we interpret historical representations of contagion.1 The novel’s eponymous hero and his wife Camilla have received a request from Mr Ratcliff, their rich but autocratic and treacherous relation, demanding a visit from their son Peter, to whom he stands godfather. David’s difficult decision to refuse this request at the risk of undermining his son’s prospects is made easier when ‘young Peter fell ill of the Smallpox’. Camilla persuades David to write Ratcliff a ‘civil’ letter explaining ‘that the Boy was at present too ill to take a Journey, and they were apprehensive was breeding the Small-pox’ (p. 387). Affronted, Ratcliff replies with a tirade against their ingratitude and deception, to which he adds this postscript: P.S. … you have rewarded all my dear wife’s good Offices to you, with her Destruction; for, by my being abroad, she unfortunately opened your Letter, and I found her in Fits on my return, with the Fright of seeing the name of the Small-pox in your careless letter: and you know too, she has never had that Distemper, (p. 386)
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.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it