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Diplomat, Egyptologist, writer and historian, Eduard Toda is remembered as the man who rescued the Algherese dialect of Catalan from oblivion and who helped rebuild the monastery libraries of Escornalbou and Poblet. On the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death, this paper reviews Toda’s book collecting activities, his general love of books and his outstanding work as a benefactor of libraries, which together contributed to enriching our country’s book heritage. The paper then turns to Toda’s relationship with the school for librarians the Escola de Bibliotecàries, which was founded thanks to his donation of a number of book collections to the Library of Catalonia. As recorded in the archives of the old Escola, this relationship was based on a number of different activities: Toda’s trips to Escornalbou, which also provided an opportunity for cultural study; his organization of periods of residence for student librarians at Poblet to help rebuild the monastery’s library; his creation of classes in book restoration in degree courses in librarianship; and the creation of a workshop for restoring library materials, which for many decades helped to link the Escola and the Library of Catalonia. Finally, as the article shows, Toda’s ties with the Escola de Bibliotecàries were reinforced by the mutual affection existing between him and the school as well as by the activities he organized with its students, which gave the school its singular nature as a place of study during the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper is a review of Pasión por la historia antigua. De Gibbon a nuestros días, a collective book edited by A. Duplá, Ch. Núñez y G. Reimond. I present each chapter of it, dedicated to a distinguished figure in the historiography of ancient history from the eighteenth century to the present days. I propose a series of reflections for each one of them and for the book as a hole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State and international entities can have profound effects on the development of a country's nursing profession. Through a global health governance lens, this paper explores the development of nursing in Brazil during the early twentieth century, and its intersections with national and international interests. Accordingly, we will show how state policies established an environment that fostered the institutionalization of nursing as a profession in Brazil and supported it as a means to increase the presence of females in nation building processes. The State focused on recruiting elite women for nursing, in part due to the Rockefeller Foundation's involvement in the country. Nurses who worked for Rockefeller came from well-educated classes within US society with specific ideas about who should be a nurse and the roles of nurses in a healthcare system. These women served as the primary vehicles for interacting with Brazilian health authorities responsible for health system development. Their early efforts did not, however, ensure a system capable of producing nursing human resources at a rate that, in present day Brazil, could meet the health needs of the country. Findings from this paper offer new avenues for historians to explore the early roots of professional nursing through a global health governance lens, improve the understanding of the intersection between international politics and professionalization, and highlight how these factors may impact nursing human resources production in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is aimed, firstly, at suggesting the need for in-training Primary Education Teachers to build up general knowledge about science structuring contents as well as history of science from a gender perspective. This training in science should help students to analyse the relationships between science-technology and gendersociety throughout history and at present. Secondly, a qualitative research carried out about a proposal developed by Science Didactics students of the Degree in Primary Education in the University of Granada about biographies of female scientists is described. Finally, the results of the research are presented, all leading to some key ideas on how to introduce the gender approach in the teaching of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper is a result of a dialogue initiated between the course Anthropology of the Uterus and the literary work "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" written by the journalist Rebecca Skloot. In the midst of the corporeal and metaphorical discussions about uteruses and the wider topic of health, we explore several discussions about race, body, morality and science. As a means of presenting such immersion, I relied on the book which tells the story of Henrietta Lacks and her family's journey, searching for truths about the cells removed from Henrietta's uterus. The cells extracted, without her consent, were kept alive and became protagonists in the revolution of medical technologies of the XXth century. Hence, HeLa cells were born, propelling a multibillion-dollar biomedical industry. But the history of the Lacks family, intensely shaped by the tragedy of the loosing their mother, was silenced and caught at the service of an inhuman, racist and market driven medical ethics. I seek to present analysis an that articulates the ethical path of the cells, recounting the context in which they were extracted and the trajectory of the Lacks family, in search of clarifications and recognition for their contributions to medical science. The narrative aims to open up new horizons that converse with the pulsating universe of the uterus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the new forms of organizing the social sphere from the key of hybridization. The object of analysis is placed on the interrelationship between the public and private sphere in the context of biographic narratives. The paper specifically focuses on the movement of public to private and the resulting transformations, putting forward two conflicting interpretations called: spectacularization and politicization. In the course of the paper an ad hoc survey of blogs is taken as a starting point and a corpus of selected personal blog is semiotically analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For millennia the turtles and tortoises have been part of the mythical universe of several human cultures. In consequence, the empirical knowledge of oral transmission, the contextualized use, and the symbolic meaning of these animals exceed in antiquity and extension to the academic knowledge on them, which has not impeded, however, that chelonians are currently the most threatened vertebrates on the Earth. This paper deals with the work of explorers and naturalists who laid the foundations of the South American herpetology, in general, and the cheloniology, in particular, with emphasis in Argentina. The work of Marcos Freiberg is recognized as pivotal to the development of the scientific study of the chelonians in this country. Lastly, the progress of cheloniology in recent decades is summarized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to understand how the concept of 'career' can be applied to a specific chronic disease such as multiple sclerosis. This research is focused on 'careers' as the term is used in Symbolic Interactionism in Sociology. The qualitative research is based on thirty semi-directed interviews, four group interviews with people suffering from multiple sclerosis in French hospitals and associations, and twenty-three observations made over a one-year period. Three stages in the 'careers' of the subjects showed the onset of the disease: the start of the symptoms, the announcement of the diagnosis, which confirms the entry into the disease (and defined life before and after the disease), and the preparation of the 'biographical work'. Depending on how one lives and enters into the 'careers' of the disease, such 'careers' will be more or less complex and different, as will also be the forms of biographical paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on the professional biographies of six professors identified as excellent by senior students in three programmes at the School of Humanities, Mar del Plata State University. In-depth interviews examined the teachings and practices these instructors encountered along their educational biographies in order to find traces of these experiences in their current lives. The aim is to disclose the subtle ways in which the past influences their academic present. The life histories retrieved reveal the importance of the actors' mentors at the onset of their teaching and research at the university. The recovery of these memories allows the conceptualization of experts' role in the education of novices, thus examining what is traditionally considered as the informal supervision of teaching assistants and junior researchers. In this way, we try to create a site at the university where it is possible to discuss mentors' good practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]