George Canguilhem’s presence between 1970s and 1980s in the formation and militance for a Collective Health in Brazil: interview with Emerson Elias Merhy

Abstract

This is an interview carried out in October 2021 as part of research into the reception and circulation of Georges Canguilhem in Brazil. The interviewee, Emerson Elias Merhy, public health specialist and professor of Collective Health at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, presents in a peculiar way and full of memories of his intellectual and militant trajectory one of the French philosopher’s presence among us: that whose protagonist was the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of São Paulo in the historical period marked by the Civil-Military Dictatorship, the struggle for democracy, access to universal and public healthcare, and the theoretical, political and ethical construction of the field of Collective Health. His story illustrates one of the social and academic scenarios that welcomed Canguilhem’s thinking in Brazil, becoming one of the pillars of support for a new critical and expanded perspective on health, which emerged between the 1970s and 1980s in the country. This testimony, full transcribed, constitutes exemplary material on the phenomenon of the social circulation of ideas, especially regarding the reading and reception of Georges Canguilhem’s thought in Brazil, situated in a specific historical, political and social period.