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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]

Introduction: Tuberculosis is one of the oldest diseases that have affected humans, being in the past the main cause of death in young people and currently, is a serious health public problem in Colombia. Despite there are preventive means to avoid their increase in the community, the tuberculosis incidence has been increasing in our country. So, it is necessary to strengthen the primary and secondary prevention measures that lead to improve the patients' life quality, ensuring the effectiveness and timeliness of the bacteriological diagnosis and cutting the transmission chain from a sick person to a healthy person by searching, early discovery and treatment of the patient. The partnerships among health institutions must be strengthened in order to develop and implement community engagement strategies for the prevention and disease control. Notwithstanding having new insights into the biology and epidemiology of this entity and getting effectively alter the natural history of the disease, it has not been completely eradicated due to multiple reasons, such as drug resistance, the association with HIV AIDS, and migration of people (displaced people), which gives a challenge to achieve the objectives set by public health programs worldwide. The aim of this paper is to obtain a broad view of the disease, from its first appearances up to the present; by reviewing some aspects of the pathophysiology, diagnosis and treatment of it. Methodology: Some researches were performed in databases and search engines from the period 1978 to 2014. 128 articles were selected for this. Conclusions: The spread of TB, it is not more than a reflection of the sharp deterioration in the living conditions of millions of people worldwide and it keeps on being an important cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, which it exacerbated in recent years by several factors, including infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the multidrug resistance emergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]