ABSTRACT
When Regaud was wondering about the state’s capability of financing a coherent policy regarding the equipping of cancer centres, only a few people, at the time, like him, perceived the problem in all its dimensions. Anticipating the social and economic consequences of the distance curietherapy that his team was perfecting, he sensed the unexpected arrival of imbalances and pointed out the possibility of a risk which the promoters of the fight against cancer had not foreseen: that of seeing patients not able to benefit from equal opportunities for treatment depending on the centre to which they had access. The future confirmed the appropriateness of his forecast. On the eve of the Second World War, the disparity between organisations looking after cancer patients was considerable. A handful of model institutions offered their patients the most modern treatment technologies, while the great majority continued to use the same treatment as at the beginning of the 1920s. And the line of division between these two ‘cancerologies’ went right through the state cancer centres network. This differentiation was the result of a two-stage process. The first stage corresponded to the setting up of official and ‘free’ institutions. The inequalities of development were obvious, but the effect on treatment was limited to quantity. ‘Rich’ and ‘poor’ centres differed essentially in the number of patients which they could claim to treat annually. The second stage was marked by the introduction of new technologies in treatment which only a few centres were to be capable of acquiring. Hence a hierarchy of institutions arose based on the quality of treatment which they offered.
