Lo culto y lo popular: Medicina letrada/medicina tradicional. Hacia una práctica unificada de los conocimientos médicos

to discuss about the integration processes of the to know literate with the popular knowledge will be the objective of the present work. it is part of the analysis of an empirical example that brand the apparent existing antagonism among "traditional medicine" and "academic medicine". in the province of jujuy even survive a folk culture where the popular medicine is considered as the purest expression of the cultural half, therefore is produced in the population an alternative search to the coverage of his health: the inhabitants concurrent independently to "medical" or "quack" according to the perception of the signs and symptoms that this one may have of the disease. this duality resulting produced a mixed model of medical services, however this know popular is considered by the academic medical system as the rare, magic, mythical and exotic. for the learned medicine this knowledge constitute a luck of "illegitimate practices", being this illegitimacy in which would be straddled the popular. in a widest sense the hegemony model priority the biological dimension but it does not eliminate the social, by the contrary, subordinates it and restructures according to their theoretical-operative priorities, reducing it to a factor most. of this manner prevails a dichotomy vision and of opposition among both medical systems: the scientific and official is opposed to the traditional or illegitimate. this permitted that the expansion of medical practices hegemony on the communities drove to the transformation, the displacement and inclusive, in some cases, the elimination of this popular knowledge.