nation's presidency in February 1946, appointing Carrillo as head of the State Secretary of Public Health; when President Perón promoted this latter office to a cabinet-level ministry, Carrillo was sworn in as the nation's first Minister of Public Health on 11 March 1949. Carrillo appointed leading figures in Argentine medicine such as Salomón Chichilnisky, the neuroscientist Braulio Moyano, and his own brother, Santiago Carrillo (who had worked extensively with Moyano at Borda Hospital), to administrative posts in the new Health Ministry. Longtime colleagues at the University of Buenos Aires, Chichilnisky and the new Health Minister had become close friends during the latter's illness in 1937, and as Secretary of Health in the early 1950s he helped Health Minister Carrillo commission hundreds of public hospitals in Argentina. Perón's wife, Evita, also contributed to his tenure by coordinating public health policy at the well-funded Eva Perón Foundation with Carrillo, helping advance and fund many of his works and initiatives. His tenure would be marked by prolific, hitherto unsurpassed advances in Argentine public health. He increased the number of hospital beds in the country, from 66,300 in 1946 to 132,000 in 1954. He eradicated, in only two years, endemic diseases such as malaria, by means of highly aggressive campaigns against the vector. Syphilis and venereal diseases practically vanished. He built 234 free, public hospitals or policlinics, lowered the tuberculosis mortality rate from 130 per 100,000 to 36 per 100,000, ended epidemics such as typhus and brucellosis, and decreased drastically the nation's infant mortality rate from 90 to 56 per thousand live births. As Health Minister Carrillo prioritized the development of preventive medicine, the hospitals' running organization, and concepts such as regulative centralization and executive decentralization (centralización normativa y descentralización ejecutiva). He did so without mandating decentralization with merely economic goals imposed by the markets. Corresponding by letter with Norbert Wiener, the creator of cybernetics, Carrillo applied it to the art of government with what he referred to as "cybernology" (cibernología), creating an Instituto de Cibernología (in effect, strategic planning) in 1951. He also partnered with Argentine Railways to establish a "Health Train" service equipped with mobile clinics to reach some of the most remote and impoverished regions in the country. The service was discontinued after his resignation. Carrillo resigned on 16 June 1954, having lost support from the government in the aftermath of Eva Perón's death. He was succeeded by Raúl Bevacqua. Personal