Communication, the central word in the title of this paper, is really intended to denote a kind of pivotal point in the articulation that we wish to establish here between social sciences and healthcare. On one hand, its emergence as a field of differentiated issues with relatively new objects and examinations, in the heart of social thought, as early as the late eighteenth century, going through its earliest theoretical elaborations and empirical studies, already within the scope of the social sciences, since the mid-nineteenth century, and more recently through its differentiation as a separate discipline, in the mid-twentieth century, up to the point at which it became a true icon of contemporary societies, at the threshold of the twenty-first century. On the other hand, the relations between what we generically prefer to refer to as "thoughts on communication", tracing the historical path above, and the field of healthcare, in its broadest sense. Thus, we propose, first, to reconstitute the emergence and the evolution of these "thoughts on communication" over the last two or three centuries, highlighting their deep rooting in the social sciences and, second, to point out the privileged and variable relation, over the course of history, between these thoughts and the knowledge and practice of healthcare.
Social sciences; Communication; Healthcare