Osler and the Infected Letter: A History of Disinfecting Mail with Special Reference to Smallpox
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In January 1876 William Osler, a young Canadian physician, was recovering from a mild case of smallpox contracted while attending patients at the Montreal General Hospital (Figure 1). In a letter written that same month to an old schoolmate (ArthurJarvis), Osier described his illness and noted in closing, "You need not be afraid of this letter. I will disinfect it before sending." Concern about disseminating smallpox via the letter was well founded. In his medical textbook of 1892, Osler would later write that smallpox can be conveyed by fomites: "the dried scales [of variola scabs] ... as a dust-like powder ... become attached to clothing and various articles .... " The purpose of this paper is to review briefly the history of disinfecting mail, a topic of renewed interest following the 2001 anthrax-mail scare in this country.
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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 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
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".