Soigner à la frontière

Abstract

This article shines a light on the issues of medicine, migration and border, through the perspective of medical prescription. It builds upon a long term investigation of the hospital-dependent healthcare permanencies located at the Franco-British border. There, medical consultations reveal the difficulties and dilemmas facing healthcare professionals, who are daily confronted with exiled patients, most of them transiting through to England. These caregivers struggle to establish health monitoring with these mobile populations, and must perpetually adapt and calibrate their prescriptions to the constraints of this environment. By recounting the work of these healthcare professionals, this article wishes to question the very boundaries of medication, care and health.

Keywords

• medication
• healthcare work
• borders
• exiles
• Calais
• Dunkirk