The concept of health in collective health: Contributions from social and historical critique of scientific production

Abstract

This study aimed to understand the concept of health within Collective Health. Our analysis starts from Marxism as a theoretical reference, both to define what is a “concept” and to understand the critical thinking of Collective Health. As empirical research the bibliographic production of the main journals that bring together Collective Health publications as a knowledge area was used, which resulted in 34 papers that somehow treated the concept of health, even if it was not the main object of the study. From this analysis we identified at least three different modalities of definitions, which varied both in the referential basis used to apprehend and analyze empirical realities concerning health, and in the conceptualization of social that could be in this analysis. We have also identified that the papers ranged between a production that was strictly descriptive of these empirical realities and strictly theoretical essays, rather than to produce a concrete (empirical) thought based on the elected definition of social. It was concluded that within Health Collective the concept of health has been taken, in general, either as a notion (a partial approximation of the object) or as a motto, from an ethical-political engagement that ends up relegating the theoretical-conceptual contribution to the background.