“Within the Common People's Grasp”: Colombian Medical Publications and their Authors, 1821-1851
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines how university-educated physicians in Bogotá, Colombia made use of the printing press between 1821 and 1851, the first three decades after the country’s political independence from Spain. The first years of republican existence for the country brought challenges for the governing elite, which included public health issues such as disease epidemics and endemic conditions. This research examines the medical publications that were printed in the city starting in 1821 focusing on standalone publications such as books, booklets, and single-page proclamations. By analyzing the production of such publications, it aims at identifying the motivations and expectations of the physicians who wrote them. Furthermore, it describes how they understood the use of printed material in their goals as a group of professionals. This thesis demonstrates that physicians created a substantial corpus of medical publications and produced knowledge in a local setting using the printing press. In addition, university doctors expected to extend their practice and values down the social scale by opening new spaces to emphasize their importance to society at large. In order to reach the lower classes, medical authors resorted to a simpler writing style and relied on the help of cultural intermediaries, such as the clergy. Moreover, early nineteenth century physicians perpetuated previous colonial discourses around class and race to stake out their position in post-colonial settings. As a result, while acting as a conservative faction that did not escape the Spanish tradition, university-trained doctors were unable to curtail the influence of charlatans and empiric healers.
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".