This work is an analysis of the role played by medical handbooks for the dissemination of medical knowledge within the lay population in Brazil throughout the 19th century. The handbooks analyzed will be chosen from the texts directed to the public who did not have academic formation and with difficulties, of different orders, in finding doctors in the 19th century in Brazil. The idea that guides this article is to evaluate to what extent popular medical handbooks played the role of spreading the medical knowledge systematized in the universities.
education; medicine; science history; cultural mediation