Miguel Luis Amunátegui

[citation needed] Amunátegui began to work as a private tutor and earned a professorship in humanities at the National Institute, in spite of not meeting the prerequisite age of 21 (he was 19 at the time).

[citation needed] In 1852, Minister of Foreign Affairs Antonio Varas commissioned from him a work to affirm Chilean sovereignty in the southern part of the continent in opposition to a recent work from Argentina, from which arose the title Titles of the Republic of Chile to the Sovereignty and Possession of the Southern extremity of the American Continent (Spanish: Títulos de la República de Chile a la Soberanía y el Dominio de la extremidad austral del Continente Americano), a book that had impact in Argentina and that produced responses and counter-responses on both sides of the Andes mountains.

[citation needed] On November 13 of 1868, President José Joaquín Pérez called him to the Interior ministry, entrusting to him a conciliation program with sights on the 1870 elections.

In 1873, he was elected representative by Talca, and from his post there he fought, alongside Guillermo Matta, the educational policies of minister Abdón Cifuentes, who proposed changes to exams and where they would be held.

[citation needed] It was because of this that in 1880 Eloísa Díaz presented an outstanding entrance exam before a committee including Diego Barros Arana and Ignacy Domeyko.

During the exam, Minister Amunátegui awaited the committee's ruling in an adjacent room and celebrated with Díaz when she was accepted into the School of Medicine (Spanish: Escuela de Medicina), becoming the first woman in America to be received by the university.