Yarcho, Noe

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YARCHO, NOE

YARCHO, NOE (Noah; 1862–1912), Argentine physician. Yarcho was one of the first to practice medicine in the settlements of the *Jewish Colonization Association (ica) in Argentina. Born of a religious family in Slutsk, Russia, he worked for a while in England and in 1893 he left for Argentina, accompanied by his wife, sister of the cooperativist leader Miguel *Sajaroff. They settled in the center of the Jewish settlements of Entre Ríos. In 1894 Yarcho faced an exanthematic typhoid epidemic which exhausted the newly arrived settlers. He later wrote the first medical study on this disease to be published in Argentina. He practiced his profession with fervent idealism, striving to give spiritual as well as physical help to the Jewish and native settlers of the vast region.

[Lazaro Schallman]