The Challenge of Health Social Sciences: The Brazil Study Case

The presence of social science disciplines such as anthropology and sociology is recent in the health field, not only in Brazil and Latin America, but more generally in Europe. In the second half of the twentieth century science of the humanities such as philosophy, politics and anthropology and sociology, began to address issues related to life, health and disease and death, differently to the first historical approaches. In Latin America, in the late seventies, was a lot of social movement theory, political and professional, called collective health in Brazil, consisting of medical doctors, political activists in health field, including trade unionists, and researchers working in the social sciences of health. At this point, it behooves social scientists who have studied and taught in the complex field of health who must devise ways political, theoretical and methodological approaches to achieve the recognition of this work, both as an academic institution in the fields of life sciences and social sciences.