Published in Medical Education

Keywords: Complementary medicine, Federal University of Santa Catarina, History of acupuncture, History of health, Medical Education.

How was it possible to create an acupuncture ambulatory within the UFSC University Hospital, in the years 1990's? This is the main topic in the present text, which seeks to understand, through the introduction of acupuncture in a teaching academic space, the meetings, disputes and negotiations between two medical rationalities which follow rather different paradigms. In that purpose, it uses interviews realized with acupuncturists who acted directly or indirectly for the insertion of acupuncture into the academic medical universe, taking them as memory speeches.