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What is the importance of a study on the origins of specific national social spaces
such as the present study in which the invention of Collective Health in Brazil is analyzed?
Firstly, this study helps fill gaps in the knowledge available on the subject
gaps that are associated with the controversy reported in the international literature
regarding the meaning of social medicine in Latin America
whether it is a specific phenomenon
or a regional expression of institutionalized public health.
Secondly, historical studies provide various elements that are important to our understanding of the current moment
this fact being a consequence of the effect that Bourdieu referred to as genesis amnesia
In the case of the present study, it became clear that in Brazil
the creation of the social space referred to as Collective Health
corresponded to a rupture in the 1970s
both with Preventive Medicine and with institutionalized Public Health.
Furthermore, from a methodological point of view
this study is innovative because it is based on the reflexive and genetic sociology
of Pierre Bourdieu, permitting articulation between the analysis of the path of the agents
and the historical conditions of possibility on the other hand
between structures and subjectivities.
The space represented by Collective Health in Brazil
emerges as the product of a meeting of agents
with different social backgrounds and different positions and paths
within the scientific, bureaucratic and political fields.
The intersection of their paths created a structure
that was independent of each agent considered individually:
a network of relationships and specific representative institutions
such as The Brazilian Society of Collective Health (ABRASCO),
political institutions such as The Brazilian Center for Health Studies (CEBES)
and academic institutions such as the graduate programs of Collective Health and the Departments of Preventive and Social Medicine.
The social space thus created produced and continues to produce
critical knowledge on the relationships between health and society,
and has contributed decisively not only to the formulation of a project of sanitary reform in Brazil,
but also with the implementation of this project over the past 35 years.