Mirko Drazen Grmek (1924-2000).

Professor Mirko D Grmek, historian of science and medicine, died in Paris on 6 March 2000 aged seventy-six, at the end of a long and trying disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. "Crossing the borders" can be taken as the motto of his life and work. Without ever losing his cultural and personal roots, he was ready to widen and expand his interests and subjects of work. Of Croatian origin, he became a French citizen, defining himself as a European intellectual. Geographical frontiers, even during the dramatic political crisis and the war in Yugoslavia, during which he ardently defended the cultural and political independence of Croatia, never impeded his work. Cultural and political barriers were nonsense for him. Proudly linked to his own national and cultural roots, but at the same time a true cosmopolitan, he remained open to other cultures and political ideas. He never excluded colleagues and students from his activities because of their origins or political ideas, even in the worse period of the Yugoslav crisis, when sometimes his open attitude was difficult to keep and defend. As a researcher and teacher, Mirko Grmek crossed several disciplines, becoming in each of them an outstanding scholar and teacher. Trained as a physician, he soon turned to the history of science and medicine, then to philology in one direction and palaeopathology in the other. Nevertheless, he always maintained the highest professional standards, never losing his previous interests and results. There were also no temporal limits for his research, as he studied and published on almost all periods of the history of medicine and biology, from preHippocratic medicine to the history of contemporary medicine and science such as molecular biology and AIDS. Even his methods were flexible, systematically adapted to the problem he was studying. He was a ardent and sometimes rigid defender of philological correctness and he always preferred primary sources. But at the same time he was able to use critically contemporary knowledge and techniques to "read" anew testimonies from the past. He was able to link the "longue duree", the permanence of themes and ways of thinking thorough the historical epochs, with microchronological analysis, in the French historical tradition of accurate case studies (microhistory). Considering historical events as "biological organisms", in a constant flux, he understood them as functional processes operating within a specific historical milieu. Historical objects are not static, as they are only traces of past events in the present, and therefore they change with our ways of understanding them. "Objective" history is a methodological aim, but it continues to be elusive, the result of incomplete evidence and the inevitable inadequacy of our intellectual tools.