Manuel Argerich

Manuel Gregorio Argerich was born in Buenos Aires in 1835. His brother, Juan Antonio, was born in 1840 and was, like Manuel, a key figure during the cholera and yellow fever epidemics. He helped organize the commission to organize a plan to manage the epidemic with José Roque Pérez. He was a professor of surgery and director of an orphan's home.^[1] They were descendants of Dr. Cosme Argerich.^[1]

Argerich married and had children. José Manuel Estrada, a friend and writer said of his home life: "He requested his family to act as a clear and transparent sky, under which to calm his violent temper; he loved his young wife passionately, the only person under whose refuge he found peace and a tranquil candor - the soft love and holy happiness that his troubled soul needed. His love for his children was intense, incorporating the imagination of youth and the discretion of providence."^[2]

He was a member of the Buenos Aires Freemasons lodge.^[3]

As medical doctor, he was conscripted as a medical officer into the army] under the command of Argentine caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, then governor of Buenos Aires. He cared for the wounded and injured soldiers during the Battle of Caseros in which Rosas' authoritarian regime was finally defeated. Following the battle, which led to flight of Rosas to Great Britain, Argerich was documented to have stayed in the field voluntarily after Rosas' defeat, treating not only wounded soldiers and fellow officers formerly under Rosas' command, but also Urquiza's soldiers stricken by smallpox, with complete indifference as to which uniform his patients wore.^{[citation needed]}

A year after Urquiza was assassinated, Argerich treated the victims of Buenos Aires' epidemics of Cholera in 1867^{[citation needed]} and Yellow Fever in 1871. Argerich was identified as one of the "ministering angels" who was not part of the mass exodus from the city, but stayed behind at his peril to tend to the sick who remained in Buenos Aires. He is depicted treating a patient alongside Dr. Roque Perez in Juan Manuel Blanes' iconic 1871 portrait, Yellow Fever of the great Buenos Aires epidemic of 1871.^[4]

Although he was committed to his responsibilities as a physician, he was conflicted, he said to José Manuel Estrada 3 days before he died: "My Children! My Wife! Have I the right to defy death and risk abandoning them forever?"^[2]