The term image is used here to refer to the various aspects of these subjects contained in news stories, announcements, opinion pieces and advertisements bearing on medical knowledge and practice, the introduction of new diagnostic and therapeutic apparatus and procedures (technology), aspects of the health professions and new specialties, health care and teaching, public hygiene and social medicine, as well as popular knowledge and practice related to health and to illness and its cure and prevention. We shall analyse both scientific perspectives expressed by professionals and other points of view originating from “patients” or people outside the health professions. We are also interested in discovering who produced this information and which issues and controversies most attracted the attention of the general public. In addition, we want to find out how far journalism served as a platform for popularising scientific ideas and changes. The studies carried out up till now in Spain using the daily press have concentrated on very specific topics — repercussions of pandemics or epidemics, cases of folk healers, studies of advertisements — or else they have focused on studying the popularisation of science. Through this project we intend to establish a classification of the information published in newspapers that will be useful for later studies. The period chosen is one marked by important changes in the political and economic sphere, as well as that of science and medicine, in which the daily press had already adopted a modern model of journalism. It includes the so-called Generations of 1898, 1914 and 1927. This project is partially interlinked with others carried out by the same research group devoted to the study of popular medical knowledge and practices in the present and the past, and also the study of specialised scientific journalism.

Fresquet Febrer, José Luis

Ministry for Science and Innovation