This article deals with the increasing complexity of the field presently known as Collective Health, socially and historically constructed along two centuries (beginning of the XIXth, and all along the XXth) in terms of knowledge and practices. This complexity, evident in the multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary paradigms that coexist in the field, may be expressed at two levels: the level of its composing disciplines, which includes human, biological, medical and environmental disciplines, and the level of production and expression of knowledge, which includes the scientific paradigm and the ethical and practical paradigm of efficacy, both common to medicines (preventive and social medicine) and health policies. It also tries to demonstrate that the social and historical evolution of Collective Health as a scientific and practical field seems to indicate an irreversible change in the direction of complexity, in terms of knowledge, of intervention, and of expression of the different disciplines that are nowadays part of the field. To reduce this complexity to one single model in terms of disciplines or of styles of production of knowledge means to reduce the whole field to only one single dimension and to limit it at both mentioned levels, what is a very bad solution.
Field; Health; Multidisciplinarity; Interdisciplinarity; Transdisciplinarity
