| Summary: | In the first half of the nineteenth century, multiple initiatives to improve public health and medical care were implemented in Portugal. The main purposes of these initiatives included improving health coverage nationally, standardizing and supervising health practices, and repressing procedures strongly rooted in daily life – convent dispensaries, secret remedies,quackery, etc.As a complex political project, the effectiveness of its actions often depended on the collaboration of the public and local authorities, but its primary and most symbolic failure was the inability to repress folk medicine. This article focuses on the causes of the permanence, despite all efforts to the contrary, of the practice of folk medicine, intending to characterize this unknown universe.
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