Canada's Hot Little Prophet?: Walt Whitman, Richard Bucke, Psychiatry, and Metaphysical Religions in Nineteenth-Century Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My dissertation focuses on the friendship between the Canadian psychiatrist and superintendent for the London Asylum for the Insane, Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke and the American poet, Walt Whitman. I situate their adaptation and reimagining of a Christian ideology to suit their psychiatric and poetic needs within nineteenth-century interrelatedness of Christian, medical, psychiatric, and new metaphysical religions. The physical body is known through observation and experimentation, which then creates a “neutral” body from which other bodies can be adjudicated. This “neutral body” becomes an unnecessarily complex or impractical mechanical device that is often poorly constructed and even dangerous. In other words, both Bucke and Whitman embed a sense of Christian ideology into the physical bodies of those they are either diagnosing or writing about. The first chapter of my dissertation provides a literature review including relevant literature from the study of religion in regard to new metaphysical religions, science, and the relationship between religion and the secular. I also provide an overview of the literature regarding nineteenth-century asylums as well as the relevant literature on Bucke and Whitman. My second chapter provides an overview of the relationship between the history of new metaphysical religions and psychiatry. The bulk of my analysis comes in chapters three and four where I go in-depth regarding the relationship between Bucke and Whitman, how their ideas of religion impacted each other and their own works respectively. Finally, I examine their conceptions of religion and the body through the framework of the Cosmos. Ultimately, I argue that both Whitman and Bucke create distinct (but complementary in their consequences) conceptions of Cosmos due to a shared, Christian centred, ideological framework. Further, imagining bodies as having cosmic potential like Whitman and Bucke do, allows them to maintain their positions of authority as the science and discourse revolving around gendered and racialized bodies changes.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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".