[Medical biography: living fossils and return of the subject]

Biography, long shunned in the universities, has taken a dazzling revenge since the early 1980s--against the "Annales", to be sure, but also under the influence of "new history". As regards the history of medicine, the situation remains ambiguous. Biography, marrying ethics and progress, has always enjoyed a special place in the hearts of traditionalists; the partisans of "problem history" consider the genre pre- or ahistoric. However, for the last twenty years several authors, fascinated by the richness of individual destinies and anxious to transcend their irreducible singularities, have opened up new paths to reconciling the individual with anthropological and social history.