Mirko Dražen Grmek (9 January 1924 – 6 March 2000[1]) was a Croatian and French historian of medicine, writer and scientist.
His entire opus promotes the historical research of medical knowledge and practices by means of contemporary scientific methods, especially the study of the formation of ideas in specific societies and periods.
In 1973, Grmek became the director of the research of the history of biological and medical sciences at the École pratique des hautes études.
As a doctor of science and literature, he lectured at the universities of Berkeley, Los Angeles, Geneva, Bologna and Lausanne.
[2] Before he died, he left a large part of his library to HAZU and set up the foundations for the Croatian Cultural Center in Paris.
It was titled Mirko Grmek, the Physician of the Century[3] It said: "Recognized among the scientists from all over the world, but unknown to the general public, this Croat spent his entire life vigorously defending one idea: that medicine must have a conscience and that science is nothing without humanism."
[4] As a historian, Grmek strongly believed that a historical reconstruction should start from a clear statement of facts and a valuation of the permanent elements of the human organism.
The history of medicine, however, should be primarily a historical overview of diseases in various societies and the defense strategies used by human organisms against them.
Grmek followed the work of Claude Bernard, the founder of experimental medicine and initiator of physiology as an essential medical discipline, who believed that the notion of disease covers all the phenomena that weaken the defenses of the milieu interieur (inner space), i.e. the organism, and that disease largely depends on the environmental factors.
Looking for the causes of the disease, he analyzes in detail the disputes between French and American scientists, up to the point when Montagnier at the Pasteur Institute identified the HIV retrovirus.
Still, Grmek warns that it is very difficult to determine the pathocenosis of today's world, since the constant planetary migration of large masses of people from south to north, as well as the development of communications, have turned Earth into a global village.