The aim of this work is to reflect on the universe of healing and the work of the various medicine
formulators, demonstrating that doctors and pharmacists, during the republican regime in Pará,
competed for space with subjects without academic training. In order to do this, we sought to
analyze the hypotheses raised, taking into account the time frame from the establishment of the
Republic (1889) to 1905, when the state government inaugurated and consolidated the first
Pharmacy School in Belém. The methodology, of a qualitative nature, considered
bibliographical research and historical sources gathered from digital and physical collections.
During the republican regime in Belém, in the name of science and the interests of doctors and
pharmacists, there was an intensified fight against the healing arts of popular tradition, moving
them to the margins of legislation and placing them in the category of illegal medical practices.
Without a license or academic training to work in this field, healers, midwives, shamans and
many others were accused of practicing medicine illegally. However, although this fight took
place on several fronts, it was not defined in a single blow, as it went through several phases of
conflict and negotiation. The insistence of the popular healing arts on remaining very much
alive in the midst of so many attacks was linked to their strong demand from the population
and, as was the case with pharmacy practitioners, to the ambiguity of the republican legislation
itself, which allowed them to operate freely. Therefore, in the early decades of the Republic,
these institutions were still far from being fully medicalised spaces. The Republic that exalted
science was, in fact, a voracious consumer of "puçanga". Thus, the history of pharmacy,
pharmacists and medicines in the Amazon cannot be understood apart from the conflicts taking
place in society. The history of science itself, far from being an evolutionary and victorious
epic, has always been permeated with conflicts and resistance involving different conceptions
of the world, just like any human history.
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