This article is essentially concerned with the social representations of Health/Disease of a section belonging to the working class which lives in slums of Rio de Janeiro. More specifically, it discusses the etiologic approach for the diseases from the popular perspective in confrontation with the biomedical models and with the present interpretations provided by the medical antropology and sociology. Founded in a field research, this study points out to the fact that, as fragment of the popular culture, the health-disease view is pluralist, ecological and holistic. The basis for the popular conceptions is its very insertion in the material, historical and live world full of contradictions. The health-disease way of thinking, which is of the same time the life and death way of thinking, traces back not only to the traditional roots of these graps but also to its insertion in the industrial world; belongs to the social notion which surpasses the boundaries of time, space and class but projects itself in a specific way. Thus contributing either to define as well as to call in question the official health policies and services.