Nursing the Province Back to Health: Spanish Influenza and its Impact on Saskatchewan Women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1918, the world experienced a pandemic that was unlike any that came before it. A truly global event, Spanish influenza was incubated and mutated in the trenches of the First World War and was shipped across oceans and permeated across borders in the bodies of returning military men. It gained massive coverage in local and international newspapers and was exploited by patent medicine companies to hawk their remedies. In Saskatchewan, Spanish influenza deeply impacted both urban and rural communities, taking thousands of lives in three short months. Surprised by the severity of the diseases, the province’s Bureau of Public Health was quickly overwhelmed. Using social and digital history methodologies to analyze digitized newspaper, trade journals and other online sources, I argue that the labour of Saskatchewan women was a critical yet deeply undervalued aspect of the province’s pandemic response. The pandemic of 1918 not only highlighted the role that women played in their communities but also exposed the gaps and failings of Saskatchewan’s healthcare system, reigniting conversations around practical or “second tier” nurses. The volunteer attendants, women with no formal nursing training, entered homes to care for the sick, keep the fires lit, cook meals and care for children. These attendants provided a framework for a new healthcare provider that was introduced in the province in 1920. I argue that Saskatchewan’s failed nursing-housekeeper program was born from the province’s pandemic response and further undervalued women’s labour by undermining the physical, social, and economic autonomy that women gained from the nursing profession.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".