Foreword

Philippe Sansonetti; Liz Libbrecht

doi:10.4000/books.cdf.15001

Foreword

Texte intégral

1The Collège de France’s Chair of Public Health was created in partnership with Santé publique France, which sponsors it. I would like to begin by thanking François Bourdillon and Jean-Claude Désenclos for their enthusiastic support for the creation of this Chair, as well as Geneviève Chêne, the new Director General of Santé publique France, for her renewed interest in it.

2Public health is like a jigsaw puzzle: each of its parts can exist only in conjunction with the pieces into which it fits. The aim of this Annual Chair is to explore the main pieces of this puzzle and the logics underpinning their interlinking dynamics. A huge undertaking!

3In 2018-2019, with Arnaud Fontanet1, we explored epidemiology as the science of risk assessment in medicine. This year, with Didier Fassin, we will explore the socio-anthropological and political dimensions of public health.

Public health, which is the art of preserving the health of people grouped together as a society, will be required to develop significantly and to provide numerous applications for the improvement of our institutions.

4For a protean discipline like public health, which is perpetually seeking its own definition, this statement published in the first issue of Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale in 18292 – a key period in the discipline’s emergence – had the merit of emphasizing from the outset that, beyond clinical medicine, public health is a matter of both nature and culture.

5In 1832, as the second cholera pandemic was ravaging France, Louis-René Villermé wrote in that same journal that, “when diseases are [...] developed, they are more often fatal among the poor than among the rich”3.

6Diseases, social inequality, inequality of lives... Diseases are a powerful determinant and an unforgiving indicator of the inequality of lives. This “inequality of lives” being the common thread running throughout your work, it will be the theme of your inaugural lecture.

7Didier Fassin is a medical doctor, anthropologist and sociologist who has a Master’s degree in public health and a PhD in social science. He is currently a Director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), and Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton.

8I could summarize by saying that Didier Fassin belongs to the generation of physicians who realized in the 1980s – and perhaps for the first time to such an extent – that an emerging transmissible epidemic disease such as HIV-AIDS was more than a tragic fact of health and biology; it also revealed powerful anthropological, sociological and ethical determinants.

9Didier Fassin initially followed a classical medical and academic path. By 1987 he was assistant professor in the infectious diseases and public health departments at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. He then turned to social science in 1991 and became a professor of sociology at the University of Paris Nord in 1997, then a director of studies in political and moral anthropology at the EHESS in 1999, while building his career in an original way through a series of actions and studies in France and throughout the world: in Senegal, Congo, Ecuador, South Africa, and now in the United States. His work often comes from a critical perspective on moral and political societal issues and is deeply impactful, owing to his commitment, his sustained presence in the field, his physical and moral courage, his humanism and his non-conformism.

10He has produced equally relevant research on subjects that are strongly related to the medical field – such as the experience of AIDS patients, unequal access to prevention and care, maternal mortality, lead poisoning in children, and psychic trauma – and subjects that are strongly related to socio-anthropology – such as humanitarian action, the experience of prisoners, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants, and racial discrimination. He has also investigated police brutality, the justice system and prisons, to further understanding on how punishment is administered.

11Didier Fassin was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) grant, and has developed a whole philosophy of violence in human relationships in different geographical, political and socio-economic situations. This eclecticism and proliferation of ideas, backed by the extraordinary relevance and depth of thought in his work, have earned him international recognition. In addition to his numerous contributions in prestigious publications, this confidence is evidenced in his editorials in leading academic journals, as well as lectures delivered on the occasion of awards such as the Gold Medal of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography in 2016 or the Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award, granted for the first time to a social scientist in 2018. It is impossible for me to summarize the list of Didier Fassin’s national and international initiatives, courses, summer programs, and contributions to humanitarian actions. He is also currently also the president of the Committee for the Health of Exiles (Comede) in France.

12Finally, Didier Fassin is known for his books, which have been translated into at least eight languages. I cannot resist the temptation to cite a few titles, which alone speak for themselves: Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present (University of California Press, 2011), Enforcing Order. An Ethnography of Urban Policing (Polity Press, 2013), Prison Worlds. An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition (Polity Press, 2016), The Will to Punish (Oxford University Press, 2018) and, quite simply, Life. A Critical User’s Manual (Polity Press, 2018).

13Dear Didier Fassin, with my heartiest congratulations, I hand the floor to you now, to tell us about the inequality of lives.

Notes de bas de page

1 Arnaud Fontanet, L’Épidémiologie ou la science de l’estimation du risque en santé publique, Inaugural Lecture delivered at the Collège de France on Thursday 31 January 2019, Éditions du Collège de France/Fayard, 2019; available online: https://books.openedition.org/cdf/8263.

2 “Le Manifeste”, Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale, no. 1, 1829, re-published in Culture technique, no. 3, 1981, p. 232: http://documents.irevues.inist.fr/handle/2042/31542.

3 Louis-René Villermé, “Note sur la mortalité (parmi les forçats de Rochefort)”, Annales d’hygiène publique, industrielle et sociale, vol. 6, 1831, p. 119.

Auteurs

Philippe Sansonetti
Professor at the Collège de France, Chair of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases
Liz Libbrecht (trad.)

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On the Inequality of Lives

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Référence numérique du chapitre

Sansonetti, P. (2023). Foreword. In L. Libbrecht (Trad.), On the Inequality of Lives. Paris: Collège de France. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cdf.15005

Sansonetti, Philippe. « Foreword ». In On the Inequality of Lives, traduit par Liz Libbrecht. Paris: Collège de France, 2023. doi:10.4000/books.cdf.15005.

Sansonetti, Philippe. « Foreword ». On the Inequality of Lives, traduit par Liz Libbrecht, Collège de France, 2023, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cdf.15005.

Référence numérique du livre

Fassin, D. (2023). On the Inequality of Lives (L. Libbrecht, Trad.). Paris: Collège de France. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cdf.15001

Fassin, Didier. On the Inequality of Lives. Traduit par Liz Libbrecht. Paris: Collège de France, 2023. doi:10.4000/books.cdf.15001.

Fassin, Didier. On the Inequality of Lives. Traduit par Liz Libbrecht, Collège de France, 2023, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cdf.15001.

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Foreword

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