Abstract
In order to uncover aspects of social life of pharmaceutical pills and based on the theoretical-methodological perspective of the drugs biography, this paper analyzes the instructions of their leaflets, published in the Dictionary of Pharmaceutical Specialties (DEF), between 1971 and 1990. It seeks to explore the speeches conveyed in papers that accompanied the packaging of the "medicine pill" - to whom they were headed, what they proposed and what social effects they intended - and to understand their participation in the set of associations that allowed the stabilization of oral contraceptives in Brazil. Leaving the pharmaceutical laboratories, the patient information leaflet transited among physicians, nurses, pharmacists, owners and shopkeepers of pharmacies and women, passing from hand to hand, in offices, health services family planning entities, pharmacy counters, medical departments of companies, households and women's bag. They were the important intercommunication vehicles between these actors and in the big chain of associations produced by contraceptive pills, the patient information leaflets contributed to a minimum common denominator that allowed to return a normal and natural control practices of hormone-mediated fecundity and the formation of the fertility control pill market, where goods were giving movement to add economic, symbolic and normative values at the same time.
Keywords:
contraceptive pills; patient information leaflet, pharmaceutical market; medicines; biography