The article presents the field of the social sciences in health, part of the field of collective health, consolidated in Brazil during the 1970s. It discusses some of the sociohistorical factors central to their constitution: the restructuring of medical teaching and postgraduate courses in the 1950s and 60s, incorporating the social sciences, and the insertion of social sciences in health services as part of the struggle to restore democracy in the country during the 1970s and 80s. The article problematizes the contact between social sciences and health, taking the latter as an object, which leads into a discussion of epistemological questions seldom explored by the social sciences in Brazil to date: the relations between the biological and the social, and technological mediation in the social production of health-sickness.
Public health; Collective health; Social sciences in health; Biological and social; Technology and health