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This article examines the process of politicization of medicine and health in popular neighbourhoods in the 1970s by combining an international comparative approach and an analysis of transnational circulations of social critique, between France and Quebec. It focuses on protest dynamics fuelled by different professional groups within the health field – in particular medical practitioners and social workers, in France, or “community organizers”, in Quebec – and on practices designed, from the turn of the 1970s, to deliver medical services sensitive to the social question or a so-called community health at the local level. The article starts by analysing these critical experiences of medical power in France during the 1970s before examining similarities and differences with those developed over the same period in the Francophone Canadian region – in a different political and state configuration. It then traces dynamics of transnational circulation of these forms of politicization of medicine and health, and looks at their evolution in the 1980s. It thereby discusses the thesis of a silencing of social critique through the neoliberal expansion from the turn of the 1980s.