La spécialité de rééducation et réadaptation fonctionnelles en France : une construction entre médecine et politique, 1945-1973

Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine is a medical specialty recognized in France since 1973, under the name of “Médecine de Rééducation et Réadaptation Fonctionnelles”. Its beginnings, in France, have often been analysed by physicians of this specialty, but almost not from a social science perspective. The aim here is to understand, through a sociohistorical study, how this unique medicine emerged. With its origins embedded in many other specialist departments, Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine is both catalysed and promoted by the return to employment policies for disabled people. These policies demand medical rehabilitation and create a new medicoadministrative category “the retrievables”. This context allows a number of promoters to assert a fourth way for medicine, a clinic for the functional and social consequences of traumas and diseases, which is complementary to triumphant curative medicine, laboratory medicine and preventive medicine. By becoming an active medicine, the future RRF incorporates physical medicine without submitting to it and it differentiates itself from the convalescence sector. The context enabling the emergence of this specialty and the dynamics of its formation both provide an opportunity to reconsider its designation and the way in which medicine and rehabilitation became linked in France.