This system governs bodies and their (im)mobilities (Lapointe and Coulter, 2020), and questions the concept of governmentality as developed by French philosopher Michel Foucault (Hardt and Negri, 2013). Yet it seems to us that this medical offer, primarily private in the case of Tunisia, makes it possible to understand the strategies deployed by the stakeholders involved and the governance associated with the reception of foreign patients. However, two phenomena in particular are relatively little discussed in this literature: the urban nature of medical mobilities is poorly documented, with the result that the offer is also little studied. The lack of possibilities in Libya, for example, causes large numbers of the country’s nationals to seek medical care in Tunisia, while populations living in Southern Algeria are geographically closer to the clinics in Sfax than to those in their own country (Rouland and Jarraya, 2020). Additionally, this fact questions the “desirable” nature (Cazes, 2005) of medical mobility given that it is often more of an obligation than a choice for patients who do not have easy access to or an efficient healthcare infrastructure in their own country. The geographical literature that has examined the spatial framework of medical tourism shows that patients tend to travel much more within cross-border spaces.

Nevertheless, within the media framework of medical tourism, with its emphasis on North-South movements and the competitiveness of Southern countries, particularly in the field of cosmetic surgery, the reality of these exchanges is concealed.

Patients seeking short-term medical care in a foreign country do indeed come under a dynamic that can be described as “tourism” (Hopkins et al., 2010). The majority of foreign patients in Tunisia come from neighbouring countries, notably Libya, with patients from Western countries and from West Africa representing only a marginal percentage of the global numbers (Lautier, 2013).ĢAs such, and at first sight, these mobilities fall within the framework of medical tourism. Foreign patients thus tend to converge much more on the country’s private medical practices and clinics than on its hospitals and public clinics. While the associated infrastructures are distributed throughout the country, it is in the urban areas boasting a Faculty of Medicine and a university hospital that the highest number of private medical services can be found (Jarraya and Beltrando, 2013). Largely concentrated in the country’s major cities, this dynamic is above all an urban product that developed thanks to Tunisia’s historically strong public health system. What is referred to as the export of medical care takes place within dense exchange networks comprising a diversified and high-quality medical offer (Lautier, 2008). 1Tunisia has been welcoming numerous foreign patients to its medical facilities since the 1990s.

Precieved notion definition