Readings about developmentalist health and interpretations for the Brazilian health reform and public health

In the Brazilian public health literature, an association has been drawn between the 1970s health reform movement and what has been called developmentalist health. By investigating the discourse of two sanitarians from the developmentalist period – Mario Magalhães da Silveira and Carlos Gentile de Mello – we seek to unpick how their status of “precursors” of the health reform was constructed, analyzing the interfaces between public health, developmentalist thinking, the strategy for the construction of the developmentalist health and the health reform. Without refuting the pioneering nature of the sanitarians’ ideas, we argue that the Brazilian Unified Health System, Sistema Único de Saúde, was created not simply in continuation of developmentalist thinking.

developmentalism; health reform; public health