Wellcome to Sabers en acció (Knowledge(s) in Action), your online multi-linguistic textbook on the history of science, technology and medicine. Knowledge(s) in Action is new journey through the history of science, technology and medicine based on the latest...
—Received views and their limits in the history of agriculture, with illustrations from the United States and South Asia.— Agriculture is central to our understanding of the modern world. Dominant historical models of the twentieth century,...
—Is our problem lack of knowledge or what we know?— There is a long tradition in the historiography of science and technology, and indeed in STS, of complaining that we know little about the relations of knowledge, technical practices and society....
—A feminist category for rethinking knowledge(s) in a world in crisis.— The COVID-19 pandemic showed us to what extent our survival as a species relies not only on the care we receive, but also on the care we provide to others, from the beginning of...
—In a society that damned women for both plainness and adornment, wearing makeup became a defiant act of survival.— “Everyone hates to see make-up on his wife,” declares the character Lionardo in the Renaissance treatise On the Family (1433), “but...
—How practical methods and interpretations of composition evolved in eighteenth-century chemical analysis.— Composition is a central aspect of modern chemistry. Various substances are identified by some aspect of their elementary composition,...
—How Ancient Greek technology has shaped modern engineering and the current relevance of harmony and moderation.— Ancient Greek technology represents one of the earliest examples of human ingenuity, laying the groundwork for numerous advancements in...
—Nerves, gender and modernity at the end of the 19th century.— In 1869, the New York neurologist George Miller Beard (1839–1883) described a new disease before the American Medical Association: neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion, which in it’s...
—The naturalization of synthetic vanillin from 1874 until 1959.— Is it possible to describe a particular flavor as the taste of a century? The variety of culinary landscapes suggests that it might be difficult to claim such a dominance for only one...
—The role of sight, taste, smell, and touch in early modern chemistry.— Understanding the role of the senses in the history of science poses unique challenges for the historian. Most sensory impressions are part of our daily experiences. Often,...
—How and Why Mutagenicity Testing Became a Part of Environmental Science and Regulation since the 1970s.— The Ames test was developed in the early 1970s by Bruce N. Ames (1928–2024) to detect whether chemicals cause genetic mutations in bacteria. It...
The editorial team of Sabers en acció (@sabersaccio) is made up of research and teaching staff from the Institut Interuniversitari López Piñero (IILP) and the Societat Catalana d’Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica (SCHCT), as well as many other scholars from other academic institutions and research centres dedicated to the history of science, technology and medicine.
