Anne Marchand, Mourir de son travail aujourd’hui: Enquête sur les cancers professionnels [Dying from Work Today: A Study on Occupational Cancers]. Les Éditions de l’Atelier, 2022, 320 pages
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: cancers professionnels [Dying from Work Today: A Study on Occupational Cancers]. Les Éditions de l'Atelier, 2022, 320 pages.According to a report submitted to the government and the National Assembly in 2021, each year in France, there are between 50,000 and a little over 81,000 new cancer cases of occupational origin.These estimates diverge radically from the rate of recognition of work-related cancers, which in 2019 sat at fewer than 1,800 cases.This striking gap has been observed for decades.(1) It means that, despite the existence of a compensation system run by a dedicated branch of the national health insurance system, known as "work accidents and occupational diseases," a large number of work-related cancers remain in the shadows-undeclared or unrecognized.This was the state of affairs that led Anne Marchand to launch an investigation into nonrecourse to the law around occupational cancers, in the aim of identifying the factors underlying their social invisibility.Both the study and the issue that it seeks to illuminate represent far more than an academic exercise.Offering a public, accessible understanding of the multiple ways in which working conditions can lead to illness and death is a necessary step to designing and rethinking suitable prevention policies to confront this major public health issue.The book is divided into five parts and could not be better constructed and written to convince the reader of the urgency of action.The book is the fruit of a study undertaken from a twofold perspectivehistorical and sociological-and built on rigorous research.The first part of the book draws on archival work to situate the historical emergence of what Marchand calls "work cancer" ("cancer du travail"), and the ways in which unions, employers, and public policies have addressed it, or failed to (Chapter 1).The existence of cancers of occupational origin was first recognized in the scientific literature in the early 20th century, and scientific knowledge on the issue has continued to progress.But the representation of individual behaviors as the principal determinant of cancer has been dominant since the late 1990s.To conduct her research, in 2009, Marchand joined the Scientific Interest Group on Cancers of Occupational Origin in Seine-Saint-Denis (GISCOP93) (Chapters 2 and 3).This research-action platform, created in 2002, has a multidisciplinary research team and is devoted to three objectives: first, identify activities that expose workers to carcinogens; second, understand the factors that influence the recognition of these cancers as occupational diseases and support for the victims in their right to compensation; and third, prevent work-related cancers.Taking a comprehensive approach to understanding recourse to the law, Marchand accompanied patients suffering from lung cancer-typical from exposure to asbestos-through the ordeal of seeking recognition of the occupational origin of their disease and compensation.In this ethnography of recourse to the law, rather than positioning herself as an outside observer, she became the patients' "ally" (p.61), accompanying (1) Cavalin C., Henry E., Jouzel J.-N., Pélisse J. (eds.).2020.Cent ans de sous-reconnaissance des maladies professionnelles.Presses des Mines.
Source: Population (English Edition)
Authors: Paul Reeve, Sarah Demichel-Basnier
Language: French
Subfield: Occupational Therapy
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411017183