Recent historiography on the middle Doce River recognizes the work of Brazil's Special Public Health Service as one of the factors of regional development from 1940 to 1950, but there has been no deeper exploration of the activities and methods used by the service. An evaluation is essential to identify the concept of health and development that underpinned its practices and its conditions for sustainability. The service's contribution must be framed within its established relation with the population, who benefited from the developmental changes achieved by the agency, although it changes health practices, customs, and cultural values and re-organized space, interfering with established temporalities and redefining prevailing territorialities.
Special Public Health Service; preventive medicine; middle Doce River; culture; territoriality