Scarred by the White Plague: A Health History of Tuberculosis and the Great War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation traces the life histories of Canadian soldiers diagnosed with tuberculosis during the Great War into their post-war lives. Beginning with a contextual chapter that follows the evolution of consumption, the nineteenth century hereditary disease, into tuberculosis, the greatly feared infectious disease of the twentieth, the remaining four chapters focus on a group of about ten thousand military men who navigated illness from the point of diagnosis on the battlefields until their deaths across the twentieth century. By drawing from newly digitized personnel records and pension files of soldiers from the Great War, and combining them with six rarely consulted newspapers published by veterans while taking treatment at sanatoria, it reveals that tuberculosis was both a culturally constructed state of ill health and a debilitating disease with long-term material impacts on sufferers’ lives.\nFrom the battlefields of the Western Front to post-war Canada, tuberculous veterans’ experience of war and illness conferred upon them a dual status of disabled veteran and tuberculosis sufferer. Drawing from their experiences in the trenches, they reshaped institutional culture into something recognizable and familiar. They also contested cultural understandings of war disability and articulated radical reform for long-term tuberculosis care based upon their status as military service members and experiences as patients. Finally, they challenged the boundaries of the emerging welfare state in Canada, again drawing strength from their rights as disabled veterans and needs as tuberculosis sufferers. Tuberculosis was a lifelong, life-altering diagnosis, and tuberculous veterans collectively mobilized both of their identities in an effort to secure their welfare after the war.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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".