The US medical reform in the 1940's and 1950's included schools of thinking with unique developments and several change strategies, even though they eventually converged in a set of ideas referred under the term Preventive Medicine. In order to expand this movement to Latin America and to make it coalesce in a common proposal, Pan American Health Organization (Opas) and Mondial Health Organization (OMS) supported a series of meetings organized to that end. Their impact was felt in Sao Paulo state, resulting in the outcropping of new Medical Schools, especially outside the capital city, as well as in a reorganization of previous ones, creating Preventive Medicine, Social Medicine or Public Health Medicine departments. This particular historical moment, specifically from 1948-1967, was examined through documents dealing with the history of those departments and interviews with pioneers of Collective Health in Sao Paulo.
Keywords
Medical School; Preventive Medicine; Sao Paulo Developmentalism; Collective Health