The article centers on conflicts between the types of medicine practiced in nineteenth-century Goiás, when the discourse of scientific medicine imposed its presence and defined the spaces where physicians holding medical degrees could practice while precluding those without degrees, viewed as charlatans by the former. The analysis underscores the clashes triggered as academic medicine endeavored to hold sway over other healing arts, along with the challenges it encountered in establishing an exclusive claim to the practice of medical treatment. The careers of three physicians from the interior of Brazil serve to illustrate the slow process by which medicine achieved institutionalization.
scientific medicine; empirical medicine; Goiás (Brazil); nineteenth century