Eduardo Wilde

He was raised in Concepción del Uruguay, and attended the local Colegio Nacional (one of a system of public college preparatory schools), where among his classmates were future Presidents Julio Roca and Victorino de la Plaza.

[2] Wilde enrolled in the University of Buenos Aires School of Medicine in 1864, and as a student, he treated cholera patients during an 1867 outbreak; his own father died from the disease while a commander of Argentine troops in the brutal Paraguayan War in 1866.

These initiatives complemented his earlier work at the Justice Ministry by advancing the then isolated country's social and economic modernization — a key tenet of the Generation of 1880, as those who shared in the policy became known.

[4] The death of an illustrious uncle, Dr. José Antonio Wilde (1813–1887), led to his authorizing the renaming of the settlement, today a suburb of the Argentine capital, in the town doctor's name in 1888.

A coinciding outbreak of the bubonic plague in Asunción, Paraguay, prompted Wilde to organize a humanitarian mission to the affected area, appointing the nation's foremost epidemiologist at the time, Dr. Carlos Malbrán, as its leader.