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This article discusses the connections between health, illness and education from a historical perspective, aiming at providing clues for understanding these relationships that, as demonstrated in recent global events, cannot be analyzed separately. Over the centuries, societies have always found different ways of educating their new generations and deal with their health problems. The relationship between education and illness has varied throughout history, but in certain extreme cases, such as epidemics, this relationship intensifies and becomes more evident. Each particular situation affected the educational system and the school institutions in different ways, as it changed the life of teachers, pupils and their families, represented pedagogical challenges, and marked all of them at different levels and had an impact on their futures.This focuses on the marks left in education by certain events that took place during the epidemic since the foundation of the modern educational system until more recent times in Argentina. Such events are the succession of "plagues" from 1870 to 1920 (as the "Yellow Fever" in 1871 and the "Spanish Flu" in 1918) during the modernization processes, as well as the "Poliomyelitis Outbreak" in 1956 during the political struggle between Peronism and anti-Peronism. In both cases, we will try to a) reconstruct the ways in which society and specially school institutions went through these epidemics, b) analyze the close and changing bonds between health and education, which turned the school into a privileged space where that bond was enhanced, and c) present the consequences regarding instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a group of intellectuals and Spanish scientists found it necessary to resume cultural relations with Latin American countries that had been Spanish colonies in the past. In order to do this, they promoted a school of thought called 'Hispano-Americanism', which aimed to create a Spanish-speaking geopolitical space that would counteract the growing influence of other European powers and of the United States in Latin America. This American projection would serve at the same time to 'regenerate' cultural and scientific life in Spain and to improve the country's position in the international field. This movement relied on the financial support of the Spanish communities settled in Latin America. They contributed to the creation of cultural institutions to disseminate Spanish scientific progress. The first and most successful of these creations was the Institucion Cultural Espanola de Buenos Aires (Spanish Cultural Institution of Buenos Aires), which became a model to imitate in other Latin American countries. The associations tended to impose their own interests and priorities, focusing on acquiring more prestige and social recognition in the countries that had settled through links with local political and cultural elites. This was due to the absence of a genuine Spanish foreign policy and to the financial responsibility adjudged to the local communities of Spanish immigrants regarding cultural and scientific initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]