Toulouse (AFP)

The founder of SAMU, Professor Louis Lareng, died Sunday in Toulouse at 96 years. After moving forceps the hospital "outside the walls", this visionary also initiated "medicine without the walls" to teleport health in the countryside.

In an interview with AFP, in 2016, Louis Lareng had recalled the mission he had set when he was still a young anesthetist-resuscitator: "equal access to care ".

"It's about saving lives and caring for those who can not afford it," said the associate professor of medicine. "It is necessary to distribute well-being to all, in every point of the territory", he insisted of his accent that rolled.

His first fight, that of the UAS, this native of the Hautes-Pyrénées led him to the end, despite the prohibitions and hostilities.

The idea of ​​bringing "the doctor to the foot of the tree" had sprouted five decades ago. "At that time, there was a considerable proportion of road accidents".

Every big city had a respiratory resuscitation center for polio victims. But Toulouse is spared: Pr Lareng thinks to convert the center for the road accident.

He had to "treat the respiratory insufficiency at the foot of the tree", he stressed, "to save the patient who had stumbled on the tree, despite the prohibition of all the French hospitals, to cure outside the walls".

The doctor braves the prohibition: "I slept with the police and I left on the accident in the basket with salad". With the concierge of the hospital, who often accompanied him, "the medicalization of the emergency was being prepared underhand."

By dint of determination, Professor Lareng gets "on an experimental basis" setting up an "emergency rescue" in Toulouse.

The circular which authorizes it on February 18, 1969 already evokes a "service of general interest" subsidized to 70% by the State and coordinating "private and public relief".

However, Louis Lareng, mayor of Ayzac-Ost from 1965 to 1977, commune where he was born, did not say his last word: "It takes a UAS in all departments".

With Simone Veil, then Minister of Health, he pleads to reorganize health transport everywhere. He gets the Minister of Telecommunications nailed to his hospital bed that the "15" is dedicated to the UAS.

Elected PS de Haute-Garonne in 1981, he finalizes his battle with a law that will raise "the hostility of the government" and medical professions, but which will finally be adopted unanimously in 1986.

Already this former choir boy, who only knew his tuberculous mother through a window until the age of 2, had decided to "give time to others, despite the prevailing individualism".

- Medicine in every point of the territory -

The former medical fellow, who was brought up by his aunt, a pharmacy preparator on the death of his mother, and married to a professor of bacteriology, always has in mind "to bring health closer to the social".

"You will not stop here," General de Gaulle would have told him. "While waiting for help at the foot of the tree, you must provide that every French citizen can help," he told him, urging him to create the National Federation of Civil Protection.

Commander of the Palmes académiques in 1976, Officer of the National Order of Merit in 1981, Commander in the National Order of the Legion of Honor in 1993, then promoted to the rank of Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor in 2016, the Prof. Lareng, to whom "our emergency medicine owes a lot", was an indefatigable defender of health for all, said Sunday Health Minister Agnès Buzyn.

He continued to work on the modernization of the UAS and initiated telemedicine, a "new medical practice at a distance", which he wanted to include in the heart of regional planning.

"You can treat remotely by bringing medical advice, expertise in places where there are no doctors" or replacing "the doctor with a robot," he pleaded.

"We must continue to innovate, the day we will not do it any more we will cure as in the old days," he said.

© 2019 AFP