Knowledges, practices on Work and Health and the approaches on social medicine and labour medicine in Brasil: end of XIX century up to fifties-sixties of XX century

Abstract

The article deals with the historic-institutional trajectory of the approaches on work and health in Brazil, from the late Nineteenth Century up to the 1960s'. It is a qualitative study, with documental analysis and interviews, in wich is adopted the approach by Foucault on social medicine, and the Archeology as methodology. The historic-institutional trajectory in the interfaces between work and health starts by the approach of urban social medicine untill medicine of work force, and discuss replacement of the public health by the work sectors in the actions of the State, at the industrialization post-1930. It points at many ways to conceive the referred relationships influenced by the paradigm of the rational organization of work, the hegemonic way of work management. It traces back the industrial hygiene, the infortunistica, the psychotecnique and the behaviourial medicine as important tools of workforce-control, emphasising the effect of the industrial hygiene and its “dispute” with the occupational health and labor medicine in the 1950-60s. During consolidation of the brazilian industrialization process, in the fifties, the medical services in the enterprises crops up, as strategy, based in the OMS/OIT concept of labor medicine, as predecessors of the specialized sevices of labour medicine and safety, the legal work-control strategy, that was later instituted in seventies under military government by ministry of work and social welfare.