Addiction medicine

The twentieth entry is le suivi après la cure, and the word at the end of it is the one an English reader translates too quickly. Une cure is not a cure. It is a course: a stretch of treatment with a beginning, an end and very often a place. Faire une cure in a spa town is to take the waters for a set number of weeks; une cure de désintoxication is a stay on a unit; une cure d’amaigrissement is a slimming diet. None of these says that anything has been healed, only that something was undergone. What English means by « a cure » is la guérison, the outcome, or le remède, the thing that brings it about, and the verb is guérir. That is why this entry makes sense at all. Le suivi après la cure is the aftercare that follows the stay, and it lasts longer than the stay did. The English word reaches for the end of the story, and la cure names only one chapter of it.