Clown Doctors

The presence of clowns in hospitals and health centers is currently a realityin several countries. Clown Doctors  emerged in the mid-'80s, from the experience of Cristeensen Michael, clown of Big Apple Circus. After a presentation at ahospital in the United States he asked to visit the children who couldn’t leavetheir rooms. By continuing this work, Cristeensen founded the Clown Care Unit,the first group of visitor clowns. From this success, other groups were formed,including some by alumni of the Clown Care Unit and, and have been spreadingall over the world, especially from the nineties. Currently, there are groupsof professional clowns, artists, voluntary groups and health professionalswho have studied the art of clowning to thinking about the benefits of healthpromotion. Despite the disbelief on the part of health professionals, the clownswere gradually gaining its place in the health service and the first scientificarticles on this type of work began to emerge. In scientific communicationstudies, this fact would represent the first sign that a theme is becomingscientific, leaving the empiric to the theoric field. The journal article plays therole of knowledge formalization, for having been evaluated by peer review. Itis also considered the best way to publicizing the scientific research results,and their consequent use as an input to further research. In order to verify thecontribution of the clown performance to the health promotion with the scientificapproach, we searched scientific databases worldwide (WoS, Scopus, PubMed,
Lilacs and Scielo) and analyzed the papers published on this topic. Usingbibliometric tools, we found that most of the articles are devoted to experiences of clown
performance to children in hospital and almost nothing about experiences with elderly people.