ABSTRACT
The essay takes up an argument by Gilberto Freyre in his book ‘Sociology of Medicine’ (1963), for whom medical education must be sociologically oriented. He considers health a sociocultural fact in a multicausal perspective of social phenomena. Gilberto Freyre had already developed health-related reflections such as food, sexuality, and architecture in his masterpieces on the formation of Brazil, ‘Casa-grande & Senzala’ (1933) and ‘Sobrados e Mucambos’ (1937). In spite of the forgetfulness of ‘Sociology of Medicine’ in the Public Health debates that address the relations between Health and Social Sciences, this work presents essential issues for the sociological understanding of health field phenomena. In a dialogue with the aforementioned work, we discuss in this essay, through a kind of enlargment of Freyre’s perspective, issues that relate the mentioned sociological orientation and the academic background in the field of Health.
KEYWORDS
Sociology; Sociology of medicine; Health education