Ramón Carrillo (7 March 1906 – 20 December 1956) was an Argentine neurosurgeon, neurobiologist, physician, academic, public health advocate, and from 1949 to 1954 the nation's first Minister of Public Health. Early life and education Carrillo was born in Santiago del Estero on 7 March 1906 into an Afro-Argentine family. He attended the University of Buenos Aires Faculty of Medicine and obtained a degree in 1929 with a Gold Medal as best student in his class. He showed a preference for neurology and neurosurgery, collaborating with eminent neurosurgeon Manuel Balado, a Mayo Clinic alumnus and like Carrillo a student of Christfried Jakob at the University of Buenos Aires. Under Balado, Carrillo published his initial scientífic articles. After graduation he obtained a travel grant in order to further his studies in Europe, where he worked in the best neuroscience laboratories, Cornelius Ariëns Kappers's and Carl Vogt's among them. Career in social medicine He returned to Buenos Aires in the mid 1930s. Known in Argentina as the "Infamous Decade," Carrillo described this period in Argentine history as the "systematic sacking and destruction of his fatherland, a period characterized by the leaders' deep moral decadence, in which self-imposed corruption, economic felonies, the selling out of the national patrimony, and the impoverishment of the population's majority prevail" (Ordóñez). Disillusioned with liberal democracy, Carrillo adhered to the locally rising nacionalista thought and complemented his scientific research with evolving political ideas and cultural education. He enjoyed friendships with numerous leading names in Argentine tango culture and the new nationalist ideas, including poet and songwriter Homero Manzi (an erstwhile elementary school friend), as well as nationalist activists Arturo Jauretche and Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz, and tango and theater composers Armando Discépolo y Enrique Santos Discépolo. He also maintained close academic links with prominent German Argentine neurobiologists such as his former professor Christfried Jakob and two leading figures in Argentine neuropsychiatric science, Drs. José Borda and Braulio Moyano. Research Between 1930 and 1945 Carrillo contributed valuable original research on glial cells and the method for staining and observing them under the microscope, as well as on their evolutionary origin (phylogeny), and the comparative anatomy of the brain across the several classes of vertebrates. He also contributed novel techniques for neurological diagnosis: he refined iodine-contrasted ventriculography, called iodoventriculography, and discovered signs in it for several diseases; developed tomography, which by lack of electronic means at the time was prevented from