The article shows the theoretical and methodological proposal that, grounded in previous studies, was built during the first phase of a long-term project that seeks to develop a comparative history of medicine and public health in Latin America. For laying out purposes, this article initially develops a brief historiographical overview of the literature on the history of medicine and public health in Latin America. It then proposes a reconfiguration of the ‘health field’ concept, based on a critical analysis of the concept, that begins to appear as a framework for a long term program of Social Studies of Health Research in El Rosario University, in which this comparative proposal is articulated. In a third moment, the article presents the general outlines of the proposal. As a final result, it presents a matrix to be used in the second phase of the comparative project of the history of medicine and public health in Latin America. It was structured upon all the theoretical and methodological elements discussed in this historiography study. This matrix was composed by nine attributes and their corresponding categories, which will be used as a guide to gather the historical records and to do the respective analysis and comparison.