Pathological Realities

Mirko Grmek, Pierre-Olivier Methot

Description

Mirko D. Grmek (1924-2000) is one of the most significant figures in the history of medicine, and has long been considered a pioneer of the field. The singular trajectory that took Grmek from Yugoslavia to the academic culture of post-war France placed him at the crossroads of different intellectual trends and made him an influential figure during the second half of the twentieth century. Yet, scholars have rarely attempted to articulate his distinctive vision of the history of science and medicine with all its tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities. This volume brings together and publishes for the first time in English a range of Grmek's writings, providing a portrait of his entire career as a historian of science and an engaged intellectual figure. Pathological Realities pieces together Grmek's scholarship that reveals the interconnections of diseases, societies, and medical theories.Straddling the sciences and the humanities, Grmek crafted significant new concepts and methods to engage with contemporary social problems such as wars, genocides and pandemics. Uniting some major strands of his published work that are still dispersed or simply unknown, this volume covers the deep epistemological changes in historical conceptions of disease as well as major advances within the life sciences and their historiography. Opening with a classic essay - "Preliminaries for a Historical Study of Diseases," this volume introduces Grmek's notions of "pathocenosis" and "emerging infections," illustrating them with historical and contemporary cases. Pathological Realities also showcases Grmek's pioneering approach to the history of science and medicine using laboratory notebooks as well as his original work on biological thought and the role of ideologies and myths in the history of science. The essays assembled here reveal Grmek's significant influence and continued relevance for current research in the history of medicine and biology, medical humanities, science studies, and the philosophy of science.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• History of medicine

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823280377
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Pathological Realities

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Pathological Realities

Essays on Disease, Experiments, and History

Mirko D. Grmek Edited, translated, and with an Introduction by Pierre-Olivier Méthot Foreword by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

f o r d h a m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s n e w y o r k 2 0 1 9

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Grmek, Mirko D. (Mirko Draž en), 1924 –2000, author. | Méthot, Pierre-Olivier, editor translator. Title: Pathological realities : essays on disease, experiments, and history / Mirko D. Grmek ; edited, translated, and with an introduction by Pierre-Olivier Méthot ; foreword by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers:lccn2018011244 |isbn9780823280346 (cloth : alk. paper) |isbn 9780823280353 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects:lcsh: Diseases—History. | Medicine—History. | Medical sciences—History. | Medicine—Historiography. | Medicine, Greek and Roman—History. Classification:lccr133 .g76 2018 |ddc610.938—dc23 lcrecord available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011244

Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

c o n t e n t s

Foreword by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger Editor and Translator’s Note

Introduction: Mirko Grmek’s Investigative Pathway Pierre-Olivier Méthot

Part I. Pathocenosis: Diseases in History

1. Preliminaries for a Historical Study of Diseases 2. The Concept of Emerging Disease 3. Some Unorthodox Views and a Selection Hypothesis on the Origin of the AIDS Viruses

Part II. Experiments and Concepts in Life Sciences

4. First Steps in Claude Bernard’s Discovery of the Glycogenic Function of the Liver 5. The Causes and the Nature of Ageing 6. A Survey of the Mechanical Interpretations of Life from the Greek Atomists to the Followers of Descartes

Part III. History of Science: The Laboratory of Epistemology

7. A Plea for Freeing the History of Scientific Discoveries from Myth

ix xiii

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31 41

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75 86

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viiiContents

Part IV. Memoricide: War and the Eradication of Cultural Memory

8. AMemoricide 9. Dubrovnik: The Slavic Athens

Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

157 159

167 171 217 247

f o r e w o r d

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Berlin)

I met Mirko Grmek twice in my life in person. Both encounters happened at turning points in my own scientific career. The first was at the Sixth Course of the International School of the History of Biological Sciences on the island of Ischia in 1988. At that time, I was still working as a molecular biologist in Ber- lin. The school was remarkably relaxed and dominated by Alistair Crombie’s presence. It was also here that I made the acquaintance of Timothy Lenoir, who later invited me to spend a sabbatical at Stanford’s Program in History of Science in 1989/1990. At the end of which I decided to leave the laboratory and to move into the history of science. Mirko Grmek was the gray eminence of the school, always keeping somewhat in the background but having an eye 1 on everything. Together with Bernardino Fantini, he had founded the school as well as the journalHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, both housed at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, in 1979, and he continued to run them throughout the 1980s with the help of Jean Ann Gilder and Christiane Groe- ben. The journal as well as the school are flourishing to this day and testify to Grmek’s remarkable scientific entrepreneurship. The second time I met Mirko was about a decade later, a few years be- fore his untimely death, at the Fondation Louis-Jeantet, Geneva, during the 2 Theory and Method in the Life Sciences workshop in 1996. Now, I was preparing to move to the newly founded Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and had just finished writing my book on experimen- 3 tal systems and their role for an epistemology of biology. My impression of Mirko was again that of a grand seigneur, accompanied this time by French writer Louise Lambrichs. The most lasting impression of Mirko Grmek’s scholarship on me, how- ever, came from a third, intellectual encounter. It concerns his publications of and on the laboratory notes of nineteenth-century French physiologist

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