Scientific-medical knowledge management through media communication practices : a review of two opposite models in early 20th century Spain

This paper explores the complex relationship between two sets of practices and discourses that are essential constituents of the processes of construction and functioning of contemporary societies: medicine-health and mass media. Two context-linked and overtly contrasting case studies help illustrate the intricate dynamics of scientific-medical knowledge management, that is, from its generation and circulation to its appropriation, as articulated through mass media: first, the Spanish libertarian movement strategies of re-signification of officially sanctioned medical-health knowledge as conveyed in a medical Q&A section of a 1930s Spanish anarchist magazine; and second, the use of medical-health policies, as applied to colonial settings and portrayed through documentary films, as a crucial element for the legitimizing strategies of Franco's fascist regime in the 1940s. By pondering them jointly, and owing to the radical opposition of the approaches to knowledge management they represent, we show the application of a combined theoretical framework to tackle these processes. On the one hand, the multidimensional, social and professional inclusion-exclusion dynamics involved in the construction and circulation of scientific-medical knowledge is considered. On the other, the communication practices and discourses that are conducive of these dynamics are explored.