La Médecine chez Ford

Destouches is struck by the degree to which mechanisation changes the relationship between physical fitness and employment. Traditional heavy industry appears to demand strength. Ford's highly divided production process instead reduces many jobs to a very small number of repetitive movements.

That means workers whom other employers might classify as physically limited can still be integrated into production. Destouches observes the medical examination of prospective employees and discusses Ford's willingness to employ older people, disabled workers and individuals with various physical limitations.

At first glance this appears socially progressive. But Céline's analysis introduces a more troubling question: are workers being accommodated because their welfare matters, or because machinery has simplified labour to the point that almost any body can serve the production system?

The essay first describes the Ford organisation itself: centralised authority, standardised production and enormous scale.

It then turns to the relationship between mechanisation and the workforce. The assembly process has broken complex work into small repeated gestures. Physical strength consequently matters less than it once did.

Destouches next examines Ford's medical services and recruitment practices. He observes workers with disabilities and chronic limitations who can nevertheless be fitted into specific jobs.

The medical service therefore performs a double function: determining whether a worker can perform a particular task; and helping industry make use of bodies that might otherwise be excluded.

Céline then moves toward the larger economic question. Factory medicine can protect workers, but it can also serve productivity by keeping labour usable.

That ambiguity — medicine helping a person while simultaneously helping the machine extract work from that person — becomes the essay's central tension. The Detroit material would later feed directly into Bardamu's Ford-factory episode in Journey to the End of the Night.