Authority, power and violence: A study on humanization in health

Abstract

This article is the result of the dissertation “Collective health and philosophy: Hannah Arendt’s contributions to the humanization debate” aiming to analyze the humanization concept in the production of the Collective Health field. The study used qualitative methodology, and the empirical material was constituted by official documents of the Ministry of Health as well as selected articles in the field of Collective Health. It analyzed how the term humanization is used, trying to apprehend how it is understood and built as a concept. The reference framework was constituted by the bibliography that examines the historical context of social transformations through which working on health in Modernity has gone through, added to the reflections about the concepts of violence and power developed by Hannah Arendt. Conceptual distinctions necessary in the configuration of medical power in health services were acknowledged, providing new approaches to the topic of humanization.