Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1922, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2024, History

This thesis argues for an interdisciplinary examination of the origins and subsequent appearance of the Wassermann blood test, the first test developed for detecting syphilis, in eugenics initiatives and medicolegal mandates. When this seemingly impartial medical tool intersected with preexisting social and cultural biases regarding syphilis its story became one of blood purity initiatives for the preservation and proliferation of white normativity. Reframing the Wassermann as more than a passive medical tool highlights how ostensibly impartial medical processes can produce institutional violence in masculinized spaces of control. While the Wassermann offered a source of hope for protecting against syphilitic infection, in application, the serodiagnostic tool served as a source of scientific validation when misapplied as a quantifiable method for justifying medicolegal interventions in the 20th century US. This examination traces the bioethical legacy of the Wassermann from its 1906 development in Berlin to its appearance in eugenics-based legal mandates in the US. Through an analysis of scientific publications and court records at archives across the East Coast this paper centers those who didn't benefit from the Wassermann and investigates how scientific authority derived from an imperfect diagnostic test was harnessed to reproduce and reinforce the sociocultural biases that linger today.

Committee: Kimberly Hamlin (Advisor); Madelyn Detloff (Committee Member); Amanda McVety (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; European History; Gender; History; Law; Medical Ethics; Medicine; Public Health; Science History; Technology; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Public Health

Introduction: The Ohio Department of Health (ODH) collects and maintains records from disease intervention specialist (DIS) investigations for all syphilis cases reported to the state, including exposed partners who tested negative for syphilis. The records contain information in a structured form and in the form of free-text notes (unstructured). We sought to apply natural language processing (NLP) methods to 2019 Ohio DIS syphilis records, to (1) determine whether DIS notes contain novel characteristics, behaviors, or patterns that are not yet reported in the syphilis literature, and (2) to explore if NLP methods could be used to identify key topics in the unstructured notes. Methods: In Aim 1, we described the records and assessed feasibility of using these data for NLP analyses. We explored two approaches to numerically represent the unstructured text: (1) TF-IDF (term frequency, inverse document frequency), which measures the importance of words based on how many times they appear, and (2) GloVe pretrained word embeddings, which assign numerical vectors to words to encode their semantic meaning. In Aim 2, we performed agglomerative clustering using the structured data and unstructured text (using TF-IDF weights), with cosine similarity as the distance metric, to explore patterns in the data. In Aim 3, we explored if machine learning models could identify key topics in the unstructured text. To do this, we identified 21 key topics in the notes fields potentially relevant for syphilis transmission and DIS investigations. We manually coded these records to create “gold standard” labels for each topic (0=topic not present, 1=topic present), then trained machine learning models to identify the topics. Specifically, we explored three statistical models (naive Bayes, support vector machine [SVM], and logistic regression) using TF-IDF, and one neural network model (long short-term memory [LSTM] model) using GloVe. Results: The cluster analysis (n=1,996) yielded 7 (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Abigail Norris Turner (Advisor); Xia Ning (Committee Member); Abigail Shoben (Committee Member); David Kline (Committee Member); William Miller (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science; Epidemiology; Public Health

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, Greek and Latin

The main aim of this dissertation is to study Fracastoro's allusive technique: particularly his reception of classical authors. I will identify and assess the evidence for Fracastoro's reception of these classical authors through a close reading of the Morbus Gallicus and its classical intertexts, and by an examination of that poetry identify and uncover the motifs, themes, diction, and poetic agendas that Fracastoro recognized, engaged, and leveraged – in effect, how he read his predecessors as he produced his own work. The manner in which Fracastoro uses his classical antecedents reveals a greater complexity in Fracastoro's allusive technique than previous scholars have noticed. This project, at its core, is about coming to a better and more complete understanding of Fracastoro as a poet. Most previous examinations of Fracastoro's work (and engagement with his antecedents) tend to create a dichotomy between Fracastoro's works as a man of science and as a man of letters, often implying the primacy of his role as a scientist. In this project, I seek to draw attention to his work – and talent – as a poet. To that end, my discussion starts with Fracastoro's reception of the authors where a far more reasonable premise would be that Fracastoro was looking at them with a purely poetic eye; the first half of the project deals with the ties to Vergil, Ovid, and Catullus. The influence of Vergil's Georgics on the basic narrative structure of Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus is presented practically as a given by several scholars – but a close reading of the passages from Vergil that made a clear imprint on Fracastoro strongly suggest that it was the violent pastoralist approach that spans all of Vergil's poems that made the most significant impact on Fracastoro – indeed, it infuses the way that Fracastoro communicates the symptoms, causes, and cures for the disease. The second half of the project then moves on to Lucretius, whose influence on Fracastoro has primari (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Fritz Graf (Committee Chair); Julia Nelson-Hawkins (Committee Member); Frank Coulson (Committee Member) Subjects: Classical Studies; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1952, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Biology