On the road again
From the 1950s to the 1980s, French TV reports about rural medicine and ‘country doctors’ structured their narratives with a typical and recurrent scene: the car journeys the general practitioners have to make to reach their patients. The medical coverage of a geographically dispersed rural population became a major issue for European national health services after 1945. The recurrent scene is revealing of the particular relationship rural doctors had to the space connecting their patients in isolated areas. Beyond staging physicians’ dedication to their dispersed patients, television programming further dramatised a representation of rural areas to TV spectators as places of desertification, ageing and decline. Finally, yet importantly, medical road movie sequences work as seductive, cinematic, confession-like film elements intimately addressing doctors’ need to find a time of solitude, recollection and self- reflection, herein echoing professional endurance.
Contributeurs : Joël Danet, Christian Bonah
