Pour comprendre comment se construisent les connaissances sur l’effet des interventions en médecine, il est nécessaire de savoir où est faite la recherche clinique dans le monde, quelles maladies sont étudiées, et quels acteurs la mettent en place. Une vision globale du système de recherche peut aider à identifier des lacunes dans la production de connaissances et à orienter l’activité de recherche vers les priorités de santé, en particulier dans les régions où les ressources sont limitées. Dans ce travail nous avons construit des cartographies de la recherche clinique, c’est-à-dire des analyses agrégées de ce système complexe visant à extraire de l’information sur l’activité globale de recherche. Nous avons utilisé les registres d’essais cliniques inclus dans l’International Clinical Trials Registry Platform de l’Organisation Mondiale de la Santé pour cartographier l’activité de recherche. Dans un premier travail nous avons évalué pour 7 régions l’alignement entre l’effort local de recherche sur 10 ans et le fardeau de 27 groupes de maladies. Ce travail a nécessité le développement d’un algorithme de classification automatique des maladies étudiées dans les essais clinique basé sur des méthodes de traitement automatique du langage. À partir des données de 117,180 essais randomisés, nous avons montré que la recherche faite dans les pays riches était bien alignée avec leurs besoins. Dans toutes les autres régions nous avons identifié des lacunes dans l’effort de recherche. En particulier, en Afrique Subsaharienne, même si des causes majeures de fardeau comme le VIH et le paludisme reçoivent un effort de recherche important, d’autres priorités locales, les maladies infectieuses communes et les pathologies du nouveau-né, ont été négligées par l’effort de recherche. Dans un deuxième travail nous avons évalué l’influence du type de promoteur (industriel ou non-industriel) dans l’utilisation de réseaux de pays pour recruter des patients dans des essais cliniques multi-pays. Nous avons montré que 30% contre 3% des essais à promoteur industriel et non-industriel sont multi-pays, respectivement. Les pays d’Europe de l’Est participent dans leur ensemble de façon surreprésentée dans la recherche multi-pays industrielle. Ceci suggère les grandes capacités des industriels à globaliser leur recherche en s’appuyant sur des réseaux de pays bien définis. À l’échelle de tous les essais clinique enregistrés, nos travaux ont mis en évidence des lacunes majeures dans l’effort de recherche mondial, et montré l’influence des différents acteurs dans la globalisation de celle-ci. Ces travaux forment une brique pour le développement d’un observatoire global de la recherche médicale. / By knowing what clinical research is undertaken worldwide, where it is conducted, which diseases are studied, and who is supporting it, we could have a better understanding on how is created the knowledge concerning health interventions. A global landscape of health research may inform policy makers on knowledge gaps and on how to reallocate resources to address health needs, in particular in low-resource settings. In this thesis we mapped clinical research, i.e. we analyzed at a macro-level the complex system of health research to bring information on the global landscape of health research effort. We based our analyses on clinical trial registries included in the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform from the World Health Organization. In a first project, we evaluated within 7 regions the local alignment between the effort of research and the burden for 27 groups of diseases. This work needed the development of a knowledge-based classifier of clinical trial registries according to diseases studied based on natural language processing methods. We mapped 117,180 randomized controlled trials. For high-income countries, the research effort was well aligned with the needs. In all other regions we identified research gaps. In particular, for Sub-Saharan Africa, where major causes of burden such as HIV and malaria received a high research attention, research was lacking for major causes of burden, especially for common infectious diseases and neonatal disorders. In a second project, we compared the mappings of multi-country trials for industry- and non-industry–sponsored clinical trials, and analyzed the networks of collaboration of countries participating together to the same multi-country trials. We showed that among industry- and non-industry–sponsored trials, 30% and 3% were multi-country, respectively. The collaboration within Eastern European countries was particularly over-represented for industry-sponsored research. Industry sponsors may thus have a greater capacity to conduct globalized research, using well-defined networks of countries. Our large-scale mappings of all registered clinical trials shed light on major gaps in the effort of health research as compared to health needs. In addition, we showed the influence of different sponsors in the globalization of clinical research. These projects are in-line with the development of a global observatory for health research.

Collecting recipes was an established tradition that continued in elite English households throughout the eighteenth century. This thesis is on medical recipes and advice, and it addresses the evolution of recipe collecting from the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. It investigates elite domestic medicine within a cultural history of medicine framework and uses social and material history approaches to reveal why elites continued to collect medical recipes, given the commercialisation of medicine. This thesis contends that the meaning of domestic medicine must be understood within a wider context of elite healthcare in order to appreciate how the recipe collecting tradition evolved alongside cultural shifts, and shifts within the medical economy. My re-appraisal of the meaning of domestic medicine gives elite healthcare a clearer role within the narrative of the social history of medicine. Elite healthcare was about choice. Wealthy individuals had economic agency in consumerism, and recipe compilers interacted with new sources of information and products; recipe books are evidence of this consumer engagement. In addition to being household objects, recipe books had cultural significance as heirlooms, and as objects of literacy, authority, and creativity. A crucial reason for the continuation of the recipe collecting tradition was due to its continued engagement with cultural attitudes towards social obligation, knowledge exchange, taste, and sociability as an intellectual pursuit. Positioning the household as an important space of creativity, experiment, and innovation, this thesis reinforces domestic medicine as an important part of the interconnected histories of science and medicine. This thesis moreover contributes to the social history of eighteenth-century England by demonstrating the central role domestic medicine had in elite healthcare, and reveals the elite reception of the commercialisation of medicine from a consumer perspective through an investigation of personal records of intellectual pastimes and patient experiences.