Physical education, science, and health: notes on the holdings of the Center for Sports Memory (UFRGS)

The article offers a brief inventory of the holdings of the Center for Sports Memory and its main collections. It underscores their relevance to research on the historiography of body and sporting practices and their relation to health, education, and leisure. The structuring of physical education in Brazil dates to the early twentieth century, a time when scientific knowledge was important, especially in terms of the ties between this field and eugenics and hygienism. Physical activities were identified as part of a national project that could be felt at various levels and that made it evident that physical education would only display consistency if anchored in scientific knowledge, primarily biomedical.