Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays by Mirko D. Grmek, providing a portrait of his career as a historian of science and an engaged intellectual figure. Uniting some important strands of his published work, it covers deep epistemological changes in disease concepts and major advances in the life sciences and their historiography.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Editor and Translator’s Note
Foreword
by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin)
Introduction: Mirko Grmek’s Investigative Pathway
by Pierre-Olivier Méthot (Université Laval, Québec)
Pathocenosis: Diseases in History
1. Preliminaries to the 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
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
History of Science: the Laboratory of Epistemology
7. A Plea for freeing the History of Scientific Discoveries from Myth
Memoricide: War and the Eradication of Cultural Memory
8. A Memoricide
9. Dubrovnik: The Slavic Athens
Bibliography
Index
