editor and translator’s note

Pathological Realities brings together Mirko Grmek’s acclaimed research on , AIDS, and the historiography of science and introduces some important contributions to the history of that remain largely unknown outside the French-speaking academic world. Assembled here for the fi rst time, these essays were written and published over a period of some forty years in a variety of places, including ex-Yugoslavia, , and the United States. Taken together, they range from the global history of disease concepts and the epistemology of early modern to nineteenth-century life sciences to the historiography of science and medicine and the Balkan War. Despite their inescapable differences in style, methods, and focus, these es- says capture some of the main threads in Grmek’s critical engagement with fundamental historical, philosophical, and scientifi c questions and their wider social and political implications. In addition, Pathological Realities provides a biographical overview of Grmek’s life and work, although nothing short of a full biography could do justice to the scope of his contributions as a historian and a philosopher of the medical and biological sciences and to his complex personal trajectory. In translating and editing this new collection of essays, I have tried to re- main as close as possible to Grmek’s original prose. Style and punctuation, however, had to be adjusted in some places for grammatical reasons and to clarify the meaning of the author as well as to ensure consistency throughout the book. In texts already in English, typos have been corrected and, given that many of the original texts included dates of birth/death for main authors, I provided those that were missing in the other essays. However, despite gen- uine efforts to obtain those, some are still missing. A few explanatory notes and references have also been added sparingly to the translated texts. As with other books in this series, notes in square brackets are my own.

xiii xiv Editor and Translator’s Note Contrary to other French authors, Grmek’s use of technical terms is sparse. Still, to increase readability I have rendered the French term patho- cénose as “pathocenosis” instead of “pathocoenosis,” in contrast with earlier English translations of Grmek’s work. The term memoricide remains the same in French and in English. The French gnoséologique, in turn, was rendered as “epistemological” or “theory of knowledge,” depending on the context (see Chapter 7). Although Grmek generally cites sources with accuracy, some references were sometimes incomplete or altogether missing in the original essays. Chapter 6, for instance, was devoid of bibliographical references and Chapter 7 included only a list of sources at the end. Drawing on the original published or unpublished French versions of these essays, I have included the missing references in the text. When published, Chapters 5 and 6 lacked section titles. Those included here are thus my own. The original, handwritten French ver- sion of Chapter 7 was found too late in the Fonds Grmek in Caen to allow for a whole new English translation. Instead, I updated the text by inserting a few missing paragraphs and sentences, by adding the relevant references, and by reformulating certain passages. When publishing in English, Grmek often translated non-English sources himself. Whenever a modern and reliable English translation was available, it was used instead of Grmek’s own translation—for instance, in Descartes’s Discourse on the Method or Claude Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experi- mental Medicine. The present edition also includes updated citations that were only partially translated and bibliographical references to works published in English since Grmek’s original publication. Latin citations are provided with an English translation in notes or in parentheses. Part of Chapter 1 appeared in translation in Mirko D. Grmek, in the Ancient Greek World (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). With the exception of the analytic defi nition of the concept of pathoceno- sis, however, the present book proposes a new and complete translation of Grmek’s essay. The sections on ecology and immunology, omitted from the 1989 translation, are now available for the fi rst time in English. Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 of this book originally appeared in English in different journals and books. Chapter 3 was published in the Journal of the and Allied Sciences 50 (1995) and Chapter 4 appeared in the Journal of the History of Biology 1 (1968). The following three chapters were published in monographs or edited collections: Chapter 5 appeared in Mirko D. Grmek, On Ageing and Old Age: Basic Problems and Historic Aspects of Gerontology and Geriatrics (The Editor and Translator’s Note xv Hague: W. Junk, 1958); Chapter 6 was published in A. D. Breck and W. Your- grau, eds., Biology, History, and Natural Philosophy (New York: Plenum, 1972); and Chapter 7 was included in Mirko D. Grmek, Robert S. Cohen, and Guido Cimino, eds., On Scientifi c Discovery: The Erice Lectures 1977 (Boston: Reidel, 1981). To my knowledge, Chapters 2, 8, and 9 have never appeared in English translation. I am grateful to the following publishers for granting the rights to repub- lish and/or to translate the nine essays included here: Éditions de l’EHESS (Chapter 1), History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (Chapter 2), Oxford Uni- versity Press (Chapter 3), Springer (Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7), Le Seuil (Chap- ter 8), and Alliage: Culture-Science-Technique (Chapter 9). To some extent, this reader refl ects my personal research interests (disease ecology, retrospective diagnosis, emerging , experimental prac- tices in the life sciences, historiographical debates, etc.) through which I was initially drawn to Grmek’s work. In selecting, translating, introducing, and editing Pathological Realities, however, I have sought to provide a nuanced, balanced, but also engaging picture of Grmek’s scholarly contributions and research methods. I hope the resulting book would have pleased him and will be useful to students and scholars working at the interface of the human and natural sciences. At any rate, exploring Grmek’s wide-ranging contributions was challenging and exciting, and I feel privileged to offer them a second life here today.