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The purpose a call for papers on "History and health" at Salud Colectiva was to contribute to the development of a historical perspective on health-disease processes. We are therefore interested in calling on the perspectives of history and the social sciences to shed light on the fact that both the definition of health conditions as well as populations' possibilities for accessing essential healthcare services are the result of social processes in which knowledge, ideology, politics, and interests come into play - far from a simple reflection of objective biomedical conditions. This implies, on the one hand, that the definition of which of a population's health problems are to be attended to - as well as how, where, and who is responsible for them - is the result of relations among diverse actors (healthcare professionals, public officials, firms, users, among others), and these relations are not free of conflict. At the same time, these actors mobilize the institutional frameworks, professional knowhow, and economic interests that they represent. On the other hand, the unequal distribution of economic, symbolic, and cultural resources implies differential access to healthcare services, both for individuals and for social groups.

This work first analyzes the construction of a typology of the studies on collective health and its institutionalization process in Brazil, in which three stages are proposed: the preventive project, social medicine and collective health. Secondly, the work examines the phases of institutionalization, disciplinarization and professionalization of collective health in Brazil. Within the institutionalization phase, the study analyzes connectivity and communication, regularization of discourses and practices, the construction of a separate identity and political actions, and the incorporation and legitimation of these elements. It is concluded that the trajectory of the construction of collective health is marked by three dimensions: the theoretical-critical, the political-sanitary and the pedagogical-professional.

The article discusses the possibility of applying Kuhn's concept of paradigm to collective health. The concept and its use in epidemiology, planning and the social sciences are reviewed briefly. The study stresses the multi-paradigmatic character of collective health, resulting from the convergence of multiple epistemologies and the involvement of diverse fields such as the biological sciences, philosophy, the social sciences and humanities.