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To revise the medical notions and the historic representations about public health in Santander require to contrast the results of researches did by different historians trough of thesis, books and papers published in local universities journals. This paper proposes a history of public health implicate to surpass the academic studies about of politic and medical-scientific personalities to be assumed as a interdisciplinary and new-institutional process orientated to the analysis of the State politics about institutions, employees and patient care according to the impact of illness (endemic and epidemic) and the pressure by socio-economical groups interested in it. In this way, the sources and uses of the concept "Public Health" are explored, and its begin in Santander with sanitary politics about "leprosy colonies" are described, including medical and hospitalarian changes as consequence of the creation of the Ministry of Public Health and the Social Security Institute, and finally, a review is realized about the academic production that health and socio-humanistic professionals from Santanderan universities did related with this theme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]