A Plea for a "Behavioristâ Approach in Writing the History of Medicine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Walser, discovered that in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 many amputations were performed without the benefit of anesthesia ("Der Krieg und die Aerzte").This observation shocks us somewhat, in view of the fact that general anesthesia had been introduced successfully, according to our textbooks, a quarter of a century before.Our surprise is only possible because the medical history we read and write today is still based mostly on the writings of an elite of medical men.We are primarily students of scientific literature.Excellent as this may be, it teaches us relatively little concerning what this eUite actually did, and even less of what the average physician or surgeon did.Since our contemporaries in consultative practice are well aware of the gap which even now exists between the medicine preached and the medicine generally practised, and since studies are available which reveal the width of this gap in the 20th century, it is time that historians looked hard at the actualities of the past.Probably most of us have encountered in the course of our research other examples illustrating this gap in our knowledge.Many of our misconceptions are due, of course, to the fact that we think in terms of the present and tend to underestimate the time span extending between an invention and its general acceptance and application in times gone by, the famous "lag" of the sociologists.But as a short review of my own "surprises" seems to show, several other forms of ignorance are involved in addition.My own somewhat oversimplified concepts were first seriously shaken when I found out (see Ackerknecht, E. H. Malaria in the Upper Mississippi Valley, Baltimore, 1945, pp.115 F) that despite P. Louis and Marshall Hall's proofs of the negative effects of bleeding (ca.1830) the habit began to recede seriously only in the 1870s.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".