| Summary: | This article seeks to understand the scientific and medical construction of the notion of “frailty” of old persons. For this purpose, it relies on the analysis of a body of medical literature, conducted between July and August 2016, and field data of an exploratory survey of health professionals working around frailty. First, the text proposes a sociohistorical contextualization in order to understand the emergence of the category of “frailty” in the field of geriatrics and French public health. Then, we examine the question of the inclusion of the category of “frailty” in a broader process of medicalization of aging. The data nevertheless reveals nuances in the use of the category of “frailty”, showing that two distinct processes can be identified: one, which could called healthicization, and a second, triggering the biomedicalization of old age. These two processes imply not only different scientific postures but also actors and particular care for frailty.
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