Museu de História da Medicina do Rio Grande do Sul, Museum in Brazil

The Museu de História da Medicina do Rio Grande do Sul is a museum in Porto Alegre that documents the medical development of the state. The collection includes old books, medical instruments, photographs of doctors, and written documents that show how healing practices changed over time.

The museum grew out of the Memória Médica project run by the Sindicato Médico do Rio Grande do Sul (SIMERS) between 2004 and 2005, which created the SIMERS Historical Collection. It was founded on 19 March 2007 and opened to the public on 18 October 2007 in the historic headquarters of the Beneficência Portuguesa on Avenida Independência, lent under a comodato agreement. Its first director was the historian Juliane Serres.

The museum's home is the historic headquarters of the Beneficência Portuguesa de Porto Alegre, ceded on loan shortly after the museum's 2007 founding. Its educational sector runs monitored visits that explain how the collection is acquired, catalogued, restored and researched. In 2008 a show honoured women in health, gathering testimonies and photographs of doctors, midwives and faith healers from across the state.

The museum occupies the historic headquarters of the Beneficência Portuguesa on Avenida Independência, in the Centro Histórico, with a separate technical reserve on Avenida Bento Gonçalves. Guided visits run by the Educational Sector, created in 2008, show the storage, restoration and cataloguing work behind the displays. Researchers should contact the institution in advance to consult the archive of 150 private personal funds.

The museum is one of the few medical museums in Brazil that keeps a systematic acquisition policy for its collection. Its archive holds 150 private personal fonds of doctors and memoirists, with 1,500 photographs and 15,000 documents recorded by 2016. In 2010 it helped create the National Network of Medical History Museums, organized by the National Federation of Physicians.