HEALTH PRODUCTS, THERAPEUTIC AGENTS AND HEALTH DEMOCRACY

Abstract

The history of the pharmaceutical industry is a young one: the first work on pharmaceutical companies (1) or their organization (2) were published, 20 years ago now, in Anglo-Saxon countries. Among French historians, research on this sector activities are even more recent and date back to the late 1980s, with the publication business stories (3). This interest seems to us to be linked to several phenomena: advertising made to the major mergers of the pharmaceutical industry in the 1980s and 1990s; the difficulties health insurance systems, attributed in part to laboratory behavior pharmaceuticals; the AIDS epidemic which called into question the policies of health security than those of research or access to treatment.