This article asked how far two early trial reports claimed more than their trials could show, and read them against a debate about where a trial's authority comes from. The contribution is a reading, in the actors' own words, that places each claim against its evidence sentence by sentence, and that sets beside each report the modern summary a decision-record platform made of it.
Three findings stand on the texts. First, both reports rest their authority on the author's person, as Marks's account of the controlled trial would expect; neither shows the collective discipline that his history assigns to a later century, and neither argues from counts in the way Rusnock finds elsewhere in the eighteenth century. Second, the gap between trial and claim is narrow in Lind's chapter and wide in Jenner's Inquiry, but both reports police part of their own gap: Lind by disclosing his irregular arms and hedging his widest inference, Jenner by naming his unfinished experiment and the conjecture he admits. Third, the modern platform records keep the separations of time that the reports require, but they keep fewer of the reporters' own cautions and, in one case, attribute to the 1798 text a name and an exact age that it does not give.
The limits are plain. The Lind chapter is read in paraphrase only, because the one text at hand is an uncorrected machine reading; a proofread transcription would allow it to be quoted and checked. Only parts of each work are read. The platform records are modern summaries in translation and cannot stand for the archive. The ledger from which the article is drawn was coded twice by one model run twice and reads the records, not the texts. No eighteenth-century reader's response to either report is in the evidence.
Further research could take three directions. A full reading of Lind's Treatise, in a corrected text, would show whether the hedged conclusion of Chapter IV is narrowed or widened elsewhere in the work. A full reading of the Inquiry's earlier cases would show how many of Jenner's subjects had cowpox long before their smallpox challenge, and so how much of "for ever after" rests on them. And a comparison of other platform records with their primary texts would show whether the pattern found here, careful separation of times alongside a quiet loss of the actor's hedges, is general or particular to these two cases. Whether either author claimed too much remains a judgment for the reader, who now has the sentences on which to make it.
Appendix: the ledger's values for the two cases
The values below are the parent study's, as the two codings gave them, for the records of the two cases. "Unsettled" means the two codings differed.
| Case | act | act kind | act before proof | gap named | count | bearer named | revision in case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lind's Twelve Sailors | yes | trial-or-treatment | yes | named | unsettled | named | not-named |
| Jenner's Inquiry | yes | trial-or-treatment | yes | named | qualified-by-definition-scope-or-denominator | named | unsettled |
Agreement between the two codings across all 89 cases, for the cells above: act 75 of 89 (84%); act kind 74 of 89 (83%); act before proof 69 of 89 (78%); gap named 76 of 89 (85%); count 78 of 89 (88%); bearer named 70 of 89 (79%); revision in case 67 of 89 (75%).
Among the 23 cases the parent study reads closely, act kind was trial-or-treatment for 3. The study's own first hypothesis (E1: in most cases that show a public act, the act was taken before the cause it addressed, or its own effect, was established) was read as unclear on the strict reading (supports 8, against 3, unclear 61, not applicable 17; share 73%) and as supported on the lenient reading (supports 25, against 5, unclear 20, not applicable 39; share 83%). In Skeptron's medicine history (17 cases), E1 was unclear strict (5 for, 1 against, 11 unclear; 83%) and supported lenient (11 for, 2 against, 4 unclear; 85%).
The parent study's test of whether a record lets a later reader judge an act in its own time (a public act; a named gap between the event and its record; who bore the wait named; what would change the reading named) passed in 1 of 36 cases (3%). The parent study's figures do not say which case passed. From the cells in the table above, neither of these two cases meets all four conditions: the Lind record's revision cell is not-named, and the Jenner record's is unsettled.