Ramón Carrillo, Argentine Minister of Health

Ramón Carrillo helped improve Argentina’s standard of living and widened health care access to rural areas. A proponent in social medicine, he was Argentina’s Minister of Health under Juan D. Perón beginning in 1949. Carrillo was born in 1906 in Santiago del Estero as the first son of Ramon Carrillo and Maria Salome Gomez Carrillo. He attended the University of Buenos Aires School of Medical Sciences and graduated in 1929, became Chair of Neurology of his alma mater in 1942, and died in 1956 in Brazil. During the nine years Perón held presidency, Carrillo ushered in new health policies dedicated to Argentinean health, doubled health care services available, increased hospital beds, and created new health centers. As Minister of Health, he worked with Carlos Alvarado to heavily diminish the country’s malaria epidemic. As a large supporter for social medicine and universal public health, Carrillo believed in social justice and healthcare to be a human right (Carter, 2009; Ramacciotti, 2007).

Carrillo excelled in neurology and became increasingly involved in social medicine. In his last year of graduate school, Carrillo established a diagnostic method for examining brain tumors with iodized oil injections. During the same period, he was the editor for the school’s research and sociomedical magazine. After studying in Paris and Berlin, he was appointed head of the Neuropathology Laboratory at the Instituto de Clinica Quirurgica in 1933. Six years later, Carrillo was asked to organize the Army’s Neurosurgery Service and was appalled by the sanitary conditions for army recruits. As interim president of the university’s School of Medicines in 1945, Carrillo relationship with military and nationalistic political groups grew and enabled him to collaborate with Colonel Juan Perón for the electoral campaign. In his tenure, the new Public Health Secretariat, the Ministry of Public Health, gained more autonomy, personnel, and larger budgets.

Carrillo followed his beliefs and distributed sanitary and nutritional information freely to the public with mass media (Curto et al., 2013). Nutritional information was also disseminated. However, the rising prices of staple food items undercut the encouragement to incorporate more milk, fruit, and vegetables in the Argentinean diet. Carrillo did succeed in increasing the list of medicines, vaccines, and serums available in the nation. Argentina’s first Health Census was conducted under him. Sadly, despite the new population information and healthcare progress, not all of Argentina benefited equally. Some provinces lacked educated personnel and modern resources, which hindered treatment for the poliomyelitis outbreak in the 1950s. (Ramacciotti, 2007).

Much of Carrillo’s legacy is tied to Argentina’s efforts against malaria in the 1950s. In 1945, Juan D. Perón enabled the Minister of Public Health, Ramón Carrillo, to provide national welfare and begin the campaign to end malaria (Carter, 2009; Curto, 2013). Carrillo knew and greatly respected Carlos Alvarado and worked alongside Alvarado to spearhead Argentina’s malaria program. Argentina’s campaign received heavy support from the national government. Already, “Perón and Carrillo had significantly expanded the state’s role in providing for the health and welfare of its citizens,” from increasing available hospital space to investing in vaccination programs (Cueto, 2015). The ascension of Perón and Carrillo also provided Alvarado, the director of Argentina’s Malaria Service, the opportune support to attempt the first ever national campaign to eradicate malaria in Latin America. From 1947 to 1949, Carlos Alvarado lead the Argentina Malaria Service to eliminate malaria from Argentina. The campaign dramatically reduced malaria in Argentina thanks to the campaign’s effective organization, new technologies like DDT and motor vehicles, and the regime’s ideology policy on wide-reaching public health.

Carrillo’s beliefs are also an integral part of his legacy. In the late 1940s, he published, and created policies that held “health, sanitation, and social welfare as integral elements of the governing ideology” (Cueto, 2015). Inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, President Roosevelt’s New Deal, Argentine hygienists, the contemporary eugenics movement, the British National Health plan, and more, Carrillo defined health by WHO’s 1946 description “as a state of complete physical, social, and mental well-being, and not just the absence of conditions or illnesses.” Carrillo and Perón believed that Argentina should be technologically and scientifically self-sufficient and be capable of solving their nation’s problems. Carrillo also believed that health problems and illnesses could only be truly solved by bettering the people’s social conditions, from improved housing to nutrition (Alzugaray, 1988).

To achieve his ideal standards of living for Argentina’s people, Carrillo enacted a series of measures with mixed results. He widened the access to healthcare with new hospitals, clinics, sanitation, and vaccine programs. Together with Perón, they strengthened the government’s role in providing health care through expanded public health infrastructure. Argentina’s malaria campaign was carried out viewing public health as “a short-term intervention furnished by the state, not as a continuous preventive work done from the community” (Curto et al., 2013). Contrary to this outlook, Carrillo’s perceived plan was to solve Argentinian diseases to focus on the more complex issues citizens faced. Due to political and funding issues, Carrillo was unable to provide equitable health care access across the state and fully realize his social health ideals. He resigned from the Ministry of Health and left a legacy of free health care and public awareness for health (Ceballos de Marín, 2013).

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Additional Resources

Carrillo, R. (1974). Contribuciones al conocimiento sanitario(2. ed., His obras completas, 2). Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires.

Carrillo, R. El Gran Sanitarista Argentino (1906 – 1956) Nacido en Santiago del Estero. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://pinotdf.com.ar/ramon-carrillo-el-gran-sanitarista-argentino-1906-1956-nacido-en-santiago-del-estero/

Pigna, F. (2019, February 11). Ramón Carrillo, precursor del sanitarismo argentino. Retrieved from https://www.elhistoriador.com.ar/ramon-carrillo-precursor-del-sanitarismo-argentino/

Ramacciotti, K. (2009). La política sanitaria del peronismo. Buenos Aires: Biblos.

Rubinstein, A., Barani, M. & Lopez, A. (2018) Quality first for effective universal health coverage in low-income and middle-income countries. The Lancet Global Health 6 (11): e1142-e1143.

References

Alzugaray, R. (1988). Ramón carrillo, el fundador del sanitarismo nacional (Biblioteca política argentina, 225-226). Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina.

Carter, E. (2009). "God bless general Perón": DDT and the endgame of malaria eradication in Argentina in the 1940s. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 64(1), 78-122.

Ceballos de Marín, F., & San Remo, J. (2013). Ramón carrillo : El médico de los humildes (Colección bicentenario, volumen 3). Salta, Argentina: Mundo Editorial.

Cueto, M. (2005). "Appropriation and Resistance: Local Responses to Malaria Eradication in Mexico, 1955–1970". Journal of Latin American Studies, 37(3), 555.

Curto, S., Andrade, H., Chuit, R., & Boffi, R. (2013). "Historia del control del paludismo en argentina". Revista Geográfica, 153(153), 91-144.

Ramacciotti, K. (2007). “Ramón Carrillo,” in Dictionary of Medical Biography, ed. W. F. Bynum and Helen Bynum, pp. 308-10. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Rock, D. (1992). Authoritarian Argentina: The Nationalist Movement, Its History, and Its Impact. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Romero, J. (1996 [1965]). Breve Historia de la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica.