The book. After his book Mediator 150 mg. How many deaths? (Editions Dialogues, 2010), the film The Girl from Brest (Emmanuelle Bercot, 2016), the play My heart (Pauline Bureau, 2017) and the book of photographs Faces of the Mediator (which she co-wrote with Marc Dantan, Prescrire, 2019), Irène Frachon presents one of the most resounding French health scandals in comics. We could legitimately say that everything has been written and said about this antidiabetic, used for years as an appetite suppressant, which has caused hundreds of deaths, in particular from valvulopathy. Well, one would be wrong. In more ways than one.
First, because if Mediator. A chemically pure crime (Delcourt, 199 pages, 23.95 euros), written by the pulmonologist – whistleblower – and Eric Giacometti, former journalist at Parisian became a novelist and screenwriter Wide Winchobviously retraces the chronicle of this drug, the authors invite the reader to follow several threads: that of the victims, that of the history of the Servier laboratories, intrinsically linked, from their creation, to the invention of the Mediator and Isoméride , a drug with anorectic properties finally withdrawn from the market in 1997 simultaneously in the United States and France. “Isomeride and Mediator actually release the same poison [formule chimique à l’appui à la fin de la BD] in the body”, say the authors.
no one is spared
Then, because, if this graphic novel, drawn by François Duprat and colored by Paul Bona, is full of explanations, medical and scientific details and could put off the neophyte, it is on the contrary very didactic. Above all, it reads like a real thriller. No one is spared, the power of the Servier laboratories, the interpersonal skills and the political networks of their boss, Jacques Servier, the French health system, in the forefront of which the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines (ANSM), far too permeable , according to the authors, to the influences of private interests.
Throughout the story, a character, toga on the shoulder and sandals on the feet, walks from page to page: it is Hippo – Hippocrates, symbol of medical ethics. In the end, the one who plays not only the pedagogue but also the ringmaster draws three lessons on which society should reflect: the diktats imposed on women’s bodies, the existence still and always of conflicts of interest between doctors and laboratories, and finally white-collar crime, so little punished.
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