Between Expertise and Biomedicine: Public Health Research in France after the Second World War

The transformation of medical research and the rise of biomedicine since the interwar period have attracted a great deal of attention from social scientists in general, and from historians in particular. A wide range of publications has addressed crucial issues, such as the changing relationship between the clinical and laboratory sciences (the attempt “to experimentalize the clinic”, in Jean-Paul Gaudillière’s words); the scaling up of research activities related to the shift from one regime of knowledge production to another, and the resulting debate about whether there was such a thing as “Big Medicine”; the role of the “molecularization” of medicine and the life sciences in this evolution. However, the impact of the rise of biomedicine on different, but connected fields of research, such as public health, has not so far attracted the same amount of interest. As constituent parts of a single intellectual, as well as institutional configuration (or “figuration” in Norbert Elias’s words), different research areas can be interdependent in many ways. The rise and fall of a style of thought can challenge scientists operating in other areas, either directly, as when an expanding discipline undermines or trespasses on other domains; or indirectly, by questioning basic, widely shared assumptions, forcing their proponents either to reposition themselves within the changing configuration, or to affect (sometimes ostentatiously) to ignore the challenge. On the other hand, cross-disciplinary alliances reinforce the interdependence that exists between different scientific communities. Competition and co-operation between disciplines also play a crucial role in the allocation of public and private money to higher education and research. Finally, the success of a particular discipline can transform the organization of research as a whole, as when a specific division of labour developed within a new, promising area (e.g. in molecular biology) is imposed by enthusiastic policy makers as a model to be emulated by other scientific fields.