Based on the historical and social perspective, the scope of this documentary study were the strategies of the symbolic struggle for the training of agents in home visitation in the Courses for Visiting Nurses of the Brazilian Red Cross and the National Department of Public Health in Rio de Janeiro (Federal District), with repercussions in the Department of Health and Welfare of the State of Pernambuco between 1920 and 1926. We adopted the thinking of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as a theoretical benchmark, showing the symbolic struggle in the field of public health between sanitarians Amaury de Medeiros and José P. Fontenelle and public health nurse Ethel Parsons, to analyze who was responsible for the scientific authority and competence of the training of visiting nurses.
history of nursing; tuberculosis; community health nursing