Relations between health, medicine and society in contemporary Spain in the European and international context, taking into account the following aspects: public health and health policy, the dichotomy between urban and rural areas in health, the biological and social components of diseases, nutrition, hunger and food security, professionalization and specialization in the health sector, the individual and collective careers of doctors and scientists who went into exile after the Spanish civil War, and the production and circulation of scientific publications on health and disease. Therefore, the group focuses on the study of:

• Public health and health policy in Spain in the international context: circulation and transfer of knowledge, practices and equipment, health campaigns and fight against social diseased, training of experts, health policy, health administration and institutions, relations and interactions between the local, national and international framework.
• Health and healthcare organization in rural areas: international conferences on rural hygiene, medical topographies, health policies in rural areas, cultural interactions and specific health problems in rural areas, rural hygiene centers, health campaigns and dispensaries in rural areas.
• Disease in its biological and social aspects: polio epidemics in the Iberian Peninsula during the 20th century, their causes and consequences, the relationship of patients and researchers, the health system and the media, smallpox vaccination campaigns, and health campaigns against the dominant social diseases.
• Nutrition and health: the political economy of hunger and its health dimension, the problem of nutrition during the first half of the 20th century, international experts and food policy in times of crisis, and the management of food security during the 19th and 20th centuries.
• Exile of Spanish doctors and scientists after the Spanish Civil War: individual and collective careers, integration processes in the host countries and permanence in previous networks, shifts in professional identities and goals, internal exile and the return of the exiles, and imaginary returns.
• Medical journalism in Catalonia: localization and digital reproduction of journal collections, characterization of journals depending on their programmatic lines, their contents and their readers inside and outside Catalonia, the study of critical reviews as dissemination phenomena among experts, and the analysis of specialization processes through periodic medical press.
• Professionalization in medicine: emergence and consolidation of medical specializations in Barcelona, unifying and diversifying trends, relationships between specialists and generalists, the expanding city as a multiplier of supply and demand for specialized medical care, strategies for the visibility and institutionalization of medical specialties, and laboratory medicine as a determining factor in the consolidation of the specialties.

Members