"Professional pharmacy and industrial pharmacy": disputes between doctors and pharmacists in Salvador at the end of the 19th century.

Abstract

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.