Author:

• Ricardo Cabral Freitas - Freitas, R. C. - <rcabral.freitas@gmail.com>
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3648-277X

Co-author(s):

• André Nogueira - Nogueira, A. - <guazo08@gmail.com>
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2160-4279

Abstract:

The article explores how diseases were thought of and faced in Portuguese America in the early 1820s, shortly before the consolidation of the political rupture with Portugal that made Brazil an independent country. It analyzes who were the individuals called to treat the diseases of the suffering population, their knowledge and therapies. To do so, it begins with a step back in time, emphasizing the influences of the reforms of the Portuguese Empire on medical knowledge in the second half of the 18th century.
The first part of the article is dedicated to exploring the complex and multifaceted healing practices in Portuguese America, resultingthe mixtures between traditional conceptions about the body and the disease that were part of the cultural references of the local population. Then, it analyzes some of the institutional and political conflicts involved in the consolidation of scientific medicine in Brazil, especially after the transfer of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro.
Despite the political prestige of academic doctors, practitioners of the healing arts had broad supportthe population, in addition to finding social mobility in the breaches of clientelistic relationships that marked the political culture of the period.

Keywords:

Traditional medicine; History of public health; Brazil

Content:

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