An alternative narrative in the teaching of the Brazilian Sanitary Reform: the critical debate of a political choice

Abstract

The Brazilian Sanitary Reform is a fundamental chapter for understanding the history of Collective Health. In spite of the relevance of the theme, there is a tendency to focus the teaching of this content on the institutional trajectory of policies to the detriment of the 'political choice' made.  This article aims to construct another narrative for teaching Sanitary Reform, through the rescue of the arguments from three authors affiliated to the Marxist thought, Sergio Arouca, Jaime de Oliveira and Jairnilson Paim. Specific texts of these authors, in distinct socio-historical periods, are used for didactic purposes, considered as essential sources for understanding the political choices made by the movement. The excerpts of the texts that deal with the categories that are fundamental for a Marxian analysis were considered as corpus of analysis. Proposals that dialogued between the categories and the political choice of the Health Reform presented by the authors were taken as a unit of text. It is concluded that the building up of this other narrative for the teaching of the Brazilian Sanitary Reform can contribute to the expansion of a critical thought about the future of public health in the country, in the context of increasing democratic restrictions.