The Duty of the Nation: Public Health and the Spanish Influenza in Canada, 1918-19
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most studies of the 1918 “Spanish” influenza pandemic have examined the disease as a local or regional phenomenon, emphasizing its demographic and social impacts but suggesting that its long-term effects were limited. This dissertation analyzes flu as a national and transnational event that must be placed within a broader context. Using archival sources from Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, as well as newspapers, periodicals, and government documents, the author argues that the pandemic did indeed have a significant impact on the relationship between government and society and Canadian public health policy. Before the 1918 pandemic, although Ottawa played a more significant role in public health than is sometimes thought, the national government limited its efforts to protecting Canada’s borders from epidemic disease. The 1918 influenza pandemic challenged this conventional interpretation of the role of government. Disaffection arose during the pandemic from conflicts between military and civilian officials and an ineffectual federal response to the disease. In the autumn of 1918, Ottawa created a federal Department of Health for the first time to redress popular grievances. This signalled a realignment of the central government’s priorities and for the first time defined individual health as a national interest. The pandemic experience thus highlights the interconnectedness of foreign and domestic policy, war and society, and epidemics and social change. It thus presents a significant critique of the existing literature while opening up new avenues for scholarship. It engages with international scholarship by iii presenting a new origins theory for pandemic influenza and places the Canadian experience within a larger international context.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".