Este artigo visa compreender o processo de constituição do transplante de órgãos como uma prática terapêutica. Partindo dos debates do campo da Antropologia da Ciência e da Técnica, destacamos alguns elementos que teriam sido fundamentais para o desenrolar deste processo, a saber: a técnica que permite ligar cirurgicamente vasos sanguíneos; os recursos farmacológicos que auxiliam no combate à rejeição do órgão transplantado e os debates acerca do conceito de morte cerebral. Estes elementos, quando agregados, culminaram na construção desta “descoberta” e permitiram a validação desta técnica. Este processo permite compreender o modo de construção de “verdades” de uma disciplina que se pretende universal e objetiva como a medicina. Por fim, argumento que esses elementos continuam agenciando o transplante e produzindo efeitos na vida das pessoas.

In Mozambique old and new evils of body and spirit intertwine, thus allowing particular contours to modern life. Traditional diseases are reconfigured along the lines of a new thinking, and what Western medicine calls malnutrition is defined as xilala by the local traditional thinking. This study aimed to understand the point of view of both caregivers (mothers and grandmothers) of children participating in a Nutritional Rehabilitation Program and ethnomedicine experts, who find themselves entangled in a complex set of relationships through which different forms to comprehend body, health, and disease circulate. The supplement, as an object, has a life of its own and takes on new meanings when it leaves the hospital. When its use happens at home, it acquires a particularity: it becomes food. Thus, it ceases to be something inert and impersonal, which is a feature of standard medicine of the health institution. The local view centered on ethnomedicine is based on the certainty that a situation affecting a child cannot have a healing outcome if not by traditional medicine. Biomedical rationality erected from the confluence of the biological and technical sciences with their scientific postulates does not constitute the authorized discourse in this context.