Manuel Gregorio Argerich (1835–1871)

Illustrious Argentine philosopher, author, lawyer, politician, mathematician and medical doctor, born in Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...

 in 1835.

Battle of Caseros

As medical doctor, he was conscripted as a medical officer into the Unitarian Army under the command of Argentine caudillo

Caudillo

Caudillo is a Spanish word for "leader" and usually describes a political-military leader at the head of an authoritarian power. The term translates into English as leader or chief, or more pejoratively as warlord, dictator or strongman. Caudillo was the term used to refer to the charismatic...

 Juan Manuel de Rosas

Juan Manuel de Rosas

Juan Manuel de Rosas , was an argentine militar and politician, who was elected governor of the province of Buenos Aires in 1829 to 1835, and then of the Argentine Confederation from 1835 until 1852...

 in defense of Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...

, tending to the care of wounded and injured soldiers, during the Battle of Caseros

Battle of Caseros

The Battle of Caseros was fought near the town of Caseros, more precisely between the present-day train stations of Caseros and Palomar in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, on 3 February 1852, between the Army of Buenos Aires commanded by Juan Manuel de Rosas...

 in which Rosas' authoritarian "Unitario" regime was finally defeated. Following the battle, when Rosas

Rosas

Rosas may refer to:*Rosas, , a town in Catalonia, Spain*Rosas , a Spanish surname*Juan Manuel de Rosas, a nineteenth century Argentine governor*Cesar Rosas, a Mexican musician*Fernando Rosas, a Portuguese academic and politician...

 fled to Great Britain

Great Britain

Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...

, 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.

Theatrical Work

He is also remembered as a pioneer of the Spanish-Mestizo theatrical genre known as the Zarzuela

Zarzuela

Zarzuela is a Spanish lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken and sung scenes, the latter incorporating operatic and popular song, as well as dance...

, writing one of the first popular works of Zarzuela

Zarzuela

Zarzuela is a Spanish lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken and sung scenes, the latter incorporating operatic and popular song, as well as dance...

 theater in Argentina, entitled "Los Consejos de Don Javier".

Buenos Aires Epidemics

A year after Urquiza

Urquiza

Urquiza is a Basque surname and can refer to the following:*Justo José de Urquiza, an Argentine caudillo.*Named after the general:**Villa Urquiza, a neighborhood of Buenos Aires....

 was assassinated, Argerich treated the victims of Buenos Aires' epidemics of Cholera

Cholera

Cholera is an infection of the small intestine that is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. The main symptoms are profuse watery diarrhea and vomiting. Transmission occurs primarily by drinking or eating water or food that has been contaminated by the diarrhea of an infected person or the feces...

 in 1867 and Yellow Fever

Yellow fever

Yellow fever is an acute viral hemorrhagic disease. The virus is a 40 to 50 nm enveloped RNA virus with positive sense of the Flaviviridae family....

 in 1871, (according to contemporary sources) with complete and selfless disregard for his own health, and is depicted treating a patient alongside Dr. Roque Perez in Juan Manuel Blanes

Juan Manuel Blanes

Juan Manuel Blanes was a noted Uruguayan painter of the Realist school.-Life and work:Blanes was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1830. He was raised by his mother, with whom he relocated to the countryside in his early teens...

' iconic 1871 portrait, "Yellow Fever".

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Juan_Manuel_Blanes_Episodio_de_la_Fiebre_Amarilla.jpg

Death, Eulogy and Burial Place

He tirelessly continued his care of the sick until finally succumbing to the disease as one of the 13,614 victims of the Buenos Aires Yellow Fever epidemic, on the 61st anniversary of the Argentine Revolution - May 25, 1871.

Three days later, at his funeral, his contemporary Jose Manuel Estrada

José Manuel Estrada

José Manuel Estrada was a lawyer, writer, Argentinean politician, eminent speaker and representative of Catholic thought.- Biography :...

, renowned Argentine writer, eulogized him emotively (translated from Spanish):

Manuel Gregorio Argerich, who has just died, has left for his contemporaries a burning footprint through his life and death.

He has been dragged through the deepest of depths to the sublime hope of one of those noble passions that were his strength and the law of his very existence. He devoured himself as does the flame.

I have never been particularly close to him, but there are few men for whom I am so thankful of having known due to their charity; nor are there many to whom I would so spontaneously reveal myself in confidence. Because of this, I knew him, and loved him. Some individuals are of a certain nature whose excellence does not highlight, but rather penetrate, the simplicity of their most basic motivations - wherein which the theatrical complications of life disappear - and thus, we are able to perceive their cardinal focus in the healthy splendor of their purity.

Manuel G. Argerich was not a thinker, nor a statesman, nor a sage; neither was he ambitious or a warlord. He lacked the repose of the former group, and was too moral a man for the latter.

His intelligence was most clear; his will, resolute - but beyond all of these instincts and faculties, there was always the sovereign predominance of his delicate personal sensibility: exuberant, uncommon, and tyrannical.

From the rapture of feeble enthusiasm, he fell - sometimes due to a brutish crisis - into anguished states of depression. No manner of emotion, from expansive delirium to misanthropy, ever stopped having an effect upon his soul. Such an emotional sensibility will not tolerate a consistently identical tension; it is variable by its very existence, and it resists all government; it rises and falls through the scale of its full range of temperatures. In cases of exceptional manifestations, this (sensibility) can immoderately regulate someone's life - from a faith that doubts nothing, to a skepticism that explains nothing; perhaps being dragged or perhaps conquering, but nonetheless imperative as a presence, as a law, as a demigod yet indiscernible from the rest of us - what life is so subject to this description than the life of Manuel Argerich?

Everything that was born within him or penetrated his soul was converted into passion, and was reflected as such.

His ideas were the product of an imagination that often landed him in trouble; his wishes were explosive, his doubts were torturous, his disillusionment rendered him prostrate.

He knew not of the middle: timidity was repugnant to him, and rejection left him short of breath. What a soul so ideal, so dependent upon action. Indeed, it did not appear that even his shortcomings were ever dormant, for so painfully they corroded his heart.

No life is more dramatic than the lives of those like him. In the hours of what appeared to be his greatest calm, all the chords sympathetic of his nature of being incessantly summoned by outward drama responded, also incessantly, to his summons to harmonize - reproducing in the depths of his conscience the elegies of all those who suffer, the songs of all those who labor, and one by one, the thousand kinks of that knot that cannot ever be unbound, except by death itself. Thus, we can reduce to a level of subjective contemplation the marvelous spectacle that is the world and in which, through his way, with much yelling, much clamoring and much complaining, dramatized and trembled the private life of Argerich.

His political role; his own eloquence, all reflected this predisposition of his nature.

I have seen him attend a political rally, having no faith and crushed under one of the most pronounced spells of political skepticism of his life; sitting down with complete negligence, hearing but not listening, and observing with a certain predilection all the comical incidents natural to such a tumultuous gathering.

But boiling under the surface there was deep and sincere enthusiasm; as sincere as all the other enthusiasms of youth; and when he spoke, there came forth words of fire, and one could feel in the vicinity the same indescribable murmuring that preceded such words among free men of every opinion - as if it was the collective salivating of popular culture to fill the bellies of the multitudes with that sacred fire...Manuel Argerich would stay silent, the sarcastic smile gone from his face. His lips contracted, his eyebrows are ached: breathing desireously, all his muscles palpitated....it was the breath of the people that strung that proverbial harp which resonated when it made contact with the tempests of democracy.

From hunched over he straightened himself, and a unanimous acclamation took hold of him; he spoke, in the
manner than only he knew, to the people - without forms, without art, without method, but with the subjugating eloquence of a luxurious passion - akin to how Spartacus must have spoken to incite his fellow gladiators to insurrection; or how (Gottfried von Einem's) Danton would speak to the multitudes of Terror - and so, dominated the square, taking control of the debate.

That same strength pushed forward his professional career. He subordinated himself to those he protected, and with the splendor of his generosity he erased their shortcomings, having already forgiven them.

He had that virtuous principle of all things that require work and self-sacrifice: had mystical tendencies pervaded
his rich nature in larger measures, he would have been the very stuff of ancient Christian martyrs. Yet he was not
entirely lacking in common sense - which his only literary work has inspired - but it was, in him, an anomalous and fugitive element.

His life would have been less agitated and more fruitful, had it not been so volcanic.

One day he came to acquire a consciousness of his lack of equilibrium, and started to seek the means to harmonize
himself.

He asked, of his family, a clear and transparent sky in which to serenade his violent arguments; he loved his young wife deliriously, the only person under whose refuge he found peace and a tranquil candor - the soft passion and holy
happiness that his contorted soul needed; his love for his children was violently disproportionate, incorporating the imagination of youth and the discretion of providence. A new universe unfolded itself before his longing stare.

Oh! Death has aggrieved the universe. That timbered voice, docile to all the delicateness of paternal emotion, will
never again be heard in the ears of his wife - nor will his children ever come to know it, for death has now made it silent forever.

He also asked, of the scientific community, in what manner he should spread and fortify his less-hidden faculties; and so he gave himself, with the same ardor that he put forth in all the enterprises of his life, to penetrate the truth of mathematics.

In the sweet love of his home life, and in the severe labour of scientific inquiry, he searched for a moderation of his overflowing passions - which he always felt were delayed and out of harmony with the pace by which they had defined his nature in the heat of his youth.

Susceptible to all the turbulent agitations of the people, it was impossible for him to simply be indifferent to their bad fortune and desolation. This man of charity revealed himself with complete furor.

Manuel Argerich contributed to a renaissance by serving the poor - sign with which the Divine Master makes known to the people the coming of his Redemption.

"My Children! My Wife!" he told me the last time I saw him. "Have I the right to defy death and risk abandoning them forever?"

His enthusiastic spirit dragged him forward against all odds.

That painful doubt of his, was that a premonition? Poor and noble friend, when you spoke to me so...when you stretched out to me for the last time your loyal hand, the seed of death already planted in your body, producing - in an insidious state of health - producing your words and affections and highlights which were to be the last of your life...

Three days later, Manuel Argerich was dead.

(Here Estrada paused, overcome with emotion.)

My pain has no more than this expression: this expression of goodbye that now drowns in my sorrow.

Manuel Gregorio Argerich is buried in Buenos Aires' "La Chacarita" cemetery. His gravesite was declared a National Monument and is highlighted as part of the tour of prominent graves of that cemetery today.

External links

• (Spanish)
• (Spanish)
• (Spanish)
• ["Historia del arpa en la Argentina" By Marcela Méndez pp. 65 http://books.google.com/books?id=Ivlekn7J8XkC&pg=PA65&lpg=PA65&dq=%22Manuel+Argerich%22+Urquiza&source=bl&ots=Zljvq94ID6&sig=F5zvG3KtPEKqglOBxoA5n6O26h8&hl=en&ei=rPWwTKLrB8WBlAeKvIDlDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22Manuel%20Argerich%22%20Urquiza&f=false (Spanish)]
• ["Obras completas de José Manuel Estrada, Volume 9" By José Manuel Estrada, Albert Estrada Vilarrasa, Alberto Vilarrasa Estrada, Juan Mamerto Garro pp. 576–581. http://books.google.com/books?id=l0ksAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA576&lpg=PA576&dq=%22Manuel+G.+Argerich%22&source=bl&ots=csTZbSFp_J&sig=pDKFz0jwSLeYerwwio4IU-_n2fA&hl=en&ei=j9qwTJyHEML58Aa0memeCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&sqi=2&ved=0CCcQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=%22Manuel%20G.%20Argerich%22&f=false (Spanish)]
• (Spanish)