Abstract

On 26 July 1952, Eva Perón, the wife of the president of Argentina, passed away after a protracted battle with uterine cancer. Perón was affectionately known as “Evita” by the millions of primarily poor and working class people to whom she had been the public face of the Perón administration and of Peronism, its populist political program. Just months before, on May 7, the Argentine Congress had named her the “Spiritual Leader of the Nation,”a title no one else would ever hold. Perón was joined in her final days by María Eugenia Álvarez, her personal nurse and the director of the School of Nursing operated by the Fundación Eva Perón (FEP), the charity organization created by Perón to implement social welfare programs that included the distribution of food, clothes, and medicine as well as the construction of homes, schools, and medical facilities.