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In this article, conflicts involving pharmacists and doctors are presented, especially those linked to the Inspectorate of Sanitation, in the city of Salvador in the last decade of the 19th century, a topic that has not yet been addressed by the historiography. We seek to discuss how the regulation created during the imperial government to control healing practices in general and the work of pharmacists in particular, ended up limiting the work of the latter. Considering the regulations imposed on them by the health authorities to be unfair, for restricting their performance while favoring charlatans, several pharmacists fought to acquire autonomy in the face of what they considered the authoritarianism of doctors. Such conflicts reveal how much the establishment of medical science as hegemonic in the country was a turbulent process even between these supposedly allied professions. The beginning of the Republic, a context permeated by debates and transformations that occurred with the fall of the monarchy, the abolition of slavery and the initial difficulties for the establishment of power, was strongly marked by the presence of doctors, who worked together with military and judiciary to impose a new social organization. This medical presence was visible in the strong influence of racialized thinking that characterized public policies.

The scope of this article is to analyze the trajectory of Emmanuel Dias (1908-1962), a researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute (OCI) and director of the Center for Studies and Prophylaxis of Chagas Disease (OCI outpost established in 1943 in the city of Bambuí, Minas Gerais), as a key actor in the acknowledgement of Chagas disease as a public health problem in Brazil and the Americas. It seeks to show that the conquest of this acknowledgement, the cornerstone of which was the staging of the first campaign to combat the disease in Brazil in 1950, was made possible by the intense political mobilization of Dias together with the various social groups, such as physicians, politicians and residents of rural areas, public health officials, governments and international organizations. This mobilization occurred during the 1940s and 1950s in a historical context marked by intense debate about the relationship between health and development and helped to construct a network of alliances that was critical for the recognition of Chagas disease as a chronic cardiopathy, which threatened the productivity of rural workers and represented a medical and social problem that merited public health actions and programs geared to get it under control.