Collective health and artistic-literary narratives: considerations for researches in social and human sciences in health

Abstract

Artistic-literary works in Collective Health, especially in Social and Human Sciences in Health, reveal interesting potentialities as sources of data, as they can present themselves as important historical records of facts, perceptions, conceptions, narratives and social memories about themes of interest to the field in question. Thus, the present article, methodologically structured in the format of a theoretical-critical essay, aims to present some considerations regarding the possibilities of such use, in frank dialogue with authors of Literature and Collective Health who have already ventured into such audacity. Far from proposing roundabout categorical statements, in its results, it highlights different perspectives on the issue among contemporary theorists, but it also proposes possibilities for this use, in order to maintain the methodological rigor expected in the field of Collective Health, but without losing on the horizon the inventiveness and creativity that artistic-literary works can authorize and introduce, as research resources, for Brazilian sanitaryism and, more particularly, for the Social and Human Sciences in Health.