58

The book Histoire de la médecine générale de 1945 à nos jours [History of general medicine from 1945 to the present day], which stops in 2010, illustrates the laborious renaissance of general medicine. From the 1960s to the 1980s to the twenty-first century, this slow mutation, with its jolts and negotiations, alternating head-on battles and fool’s games, was essentially driven by general practitioners themselves, both in terms of the concepts of their own discipline and in terms of the organization of their practice and institutional relationships. Overwhelmed at first by the emergence and proliferation of specialties, then neglected by successive reforms of the medico-social system, omnipracticiens—later known as general practitioners—drew inspiration from the advances of their foreign counterparts as well as from within themselves, to find the resources they needed to reestablish their professional identify and develop their own skills. In this way they enabled the resurgence of general medicine and restored it to its place as an essential element within a better articulated and more efficient health care system. The following text has been largely reformulated from the general conclusion of this book, published by Éditions des Belles Lettres in 2022.