Background

Santiago Ramón y Cajal was born on May 1, 1852, in a poverty-stricken and isolated village in Navarre, the son of Justo Ramón y Casasús, a barber-surgeon who some years later, by hard work and considerable sacrifice, acquired a medical degree, and of his wife Antonia.

Education

Ramón y Cajal's early educational experiences were troubled. An interest in art displeased his authoritarian father, who decreed that his son study medicine. The son, predictably, became totally unamenable to any sort of discipline and showed contempt for his teachers and for the whole educational process. Eventually, and possibly aided by enforced apprenticeship to a barber and then to a shoemaker, he acquired sufficient formal learning to enable him to begin the study of medicine at the University of Zaragoza, from which he graduated in 1873.

After his graduation from medical school, Cajal then joined the army medical service and in the following year was sent to Cuba. There he contracted malaria and within twelve months had to be discharged from the service and sent back to Spain. After that he determined on an academic career - anatomy was the only subject of his medical course in which he showed any real interest or ability - and spent a further two years at Zaragoza studying for his doctorate. He received his doctorate in medicine in Madrid in 1877.

Career

In 1873 Cajal took his Licentiate in Medicine at Saragossa and served, after a competitive examination, as an army doctor. He took part in an expedition to Cuba in 1874-75, where he contracted malaria and tuberculosis. On his return, he became an assistant in the School of Anatomy in the Faculty of Medicine at Saragossa (1875) and then, at his own request, Director of the Saragossa Museum (1879).

From 1879 to 1883 Cajal was director of the anatomical museum at the University of Zaragoza. In 1883 he was appointed to the chair of anatomy at Valencia, having in the meanwhile made himself, virtually without aid, a highly competent microscopist and histologist. He had also, while convalescing from tuberculosis, become a skilled photographer. In 1887 Ramón y Cajal was appointed to the chair of histology at Barcelona and, in 1892, to the chair of histology and pathological anatomy at Madrid, which he held until his retirement in 1922.

Cajal was the recipient of numerous prizes, honorary degrees, and distinctions, both Spanish and foreign. In 1894 he was invited to give the Croonian lecture to the Royal Society, and in 1899 he was a special lecturer at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1909. In 1906 he shared the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine with Golgi.

In the course of more than half a century from 1880, Ramón y Cajal published numerous scientific papers and an imposing number of books. In the twenty years of his most intense activity, 1886–1906, he may be said to have laid the histological foundations of our present knowledge of the nervous system. He came to study the subject partly because he was systematically teaching himself the whole of histology, but partly also because he saw in the fine structure of the nervous system the material basis of thought and in the elucidation of that structure the answer to many of the problems of physiology and psychology.

Ramón y Cajal found that there was no clear notion of something so fundamental as how a sensory impulse was conducted to a motor fiber, since contemporary histological technique apparently was incapable of defining the course of nerve-cell processes in the gray matter of the central nervous system and, hence, the relationship of one nerve cell to another. He solved this problem by adopting Golgi’s then largely unknown potassium dichromate-silver nitrate technique and applying it to thick sections of embryonic, as opposed to adult, material. The majority of neurologists at this time believed in the reticular theory of nervous interconnection, the only prominent dissentients being His and Forel. Schäfer’s work on Medusa, published in 1878, seems to have been completely ignored.

Ramón y Cajal established first that axons end in the gray matter of the central nervous system in a number of different ways, but always independently and never so as to form a network with other axon terminals.

He showed next that although these terminals were in close contact with the dendrites and cell bodies of other nerve cells, there was no physical continuity between one such cell and another. He thus confirmed what had been tentatively suggested by His and by Forel: that the nervous system was an agglomeration of discrete and definable units. The implications for theories of the nervous function of such a structural scheme - the neuron doctrine, as it came to be known - are of course profound. It becomes possible to imagine much more clearly the existence of distinct functional pathways, in that a group of axons may be shown to terminate around one group of nerve cells and not another, instead of losing their identity in a reticulum.

On the other hand, it poses acutely the problem of how “information” is passed across anatomical “gaps” - synaptic transmission in other words. Ramón y Cajal’s studies at this time, mainly on the cerebellum, spinal cord, retina, and olfactory mucosa, also convinced him of the truth of what he called the “theory of dynamic polarization”: that the transmission of the nerve impulse is always from dendrites and cell body to axon.

Ramón y Cajal’s success in delineating nerve cells all the way to the termination of their finest processes had already enabled him - for example, in the cerebellum and spinal cord - to classify neurons according to the form and direction were taken by those terminal fibers. In 1897–1900, having adopted Ehrlich’s methylene blue stain in addition to Golgi’s, he extended his studies to the human cerebral cortex, where he was able to demonstrate the terminal arborizations of the afferent sensory fibers. He again described and classified the various types of neurons in such a way, he believed, as to permit the ascribing of specific structural patterns to different areas of the cortex, hence, he was able to place the concept of cerebral localization on firm histological foundations. His descriptions of the cerebral cortex are still the most authoritative. They led to the cytoarchitectonics of W. Campbell, K. Brodman, the Vogts, and later workers. Ample tribute has also been paid to the continuing value of his work on the cerebellum.

If the cell body itself was concerned with conduction rather than, or as well as, mere nutrition, then knowledge of its fine structure was obviously of importance. Neurofibrils had been described, but their staining was a highly uncertain business. In his autobiography, Ramón y Cajal describes how in 1903 he discovered the reduced silver nitrate method for displaying these structures. Although he does not say so, his photographic expertise may well have been a subconscious factor.

In 1904, Ramón y Cajal published Textura del sistema nervioso del hombre y de los vertebrados, in which he brought together the results of the previous fifteen years and which must rank as a classic of medical science. This massive work, more than any other, contains the cytological and histological foundations of modern neurology, yet structural detail is seen never as an end in itself but only as a preliminary to the answering of three questions: What is the functional meaning of this pattern? How does it work? By what physicochemical processes has it reached its present state across the paths of phylogenetic and ontogenetic history?

Ramón y Cajal next turned his attention to the problem of traumatic degeneration and regeneration of nervous structures. He did this in response to what he considered a dangerous revival of the reticularist theory. The main facts had not been in dispute since the work of Waller, Rainier, and others nearly half a century earlier; but there were two schools of thought about precisely how the degenerated peripheral end of the cut axon was restored to structural and functional continuity with its nerve cell. The polygenesists, who earlier had included E. F. A. Vulpian and C. E. Brown-Séquard and whose leader at the time was A. T. J.

Bethe maintained that the regenerated peripheral fibers were the result of progressive transformation and eventual fusion of the Schwann cells which had sheathed the degenerated fibers. The monogenesists, to whom Ramón y Cajal belonged, said that the regenerated fibers were the result of sprouting from the cylinders of the central stump, still in continuity with their nerve cells, and saw their opponents as reviving the reticular theory of nerve continuity in thinly disguised form. Ramón y Cajal, using his reduced silver nitrate method of staining, fully confirmed the monogenesist theory. The results of these researches were collected and published in 1913–1914 as Estudios sobre la degeneración y regeneración del sistema nervioso, still the fullest account of the subject.

Ramón y Cajal had always felt isolated from the mainstream of science, living in Spain and publishing almost exclusively in Spanish; and his isolation was increased by World War I. Nevertheless, he continued to publish papers. The most important work of his later years centered on his discovery in 1913 of the gold sublimate method which he applied to the staining of neuroglia, first described by Virchow and until recently believed to be merely a supporting skeleton for the nervous elements. This work did much to lay the foundation of current knowledge of the pathology of tumors of the central nervous system.

After formal retirement Ramón y Cajal remained director of the institute which the government had erected and named for him; he also continued to work with the tirelessness and patience which had characterized his adult life.

Achievements

• 

  Starting from the modified Golgi staining method applied to embryos or young animals, Cajal published monumental histology of the nervous system creating the revolutionary concept of the neuron doctrine and dynamic polarization of the neuron. These nerve-specific stains enabled Cajal to differentiate neurons from other cells and to trace the structure and connections of nerve cells in gray matter and the spinal cord. The stains have also been of great value in the diagnosis of brain tumours. He also introduced new staining methods including reduced silver nitrate, formol-urano and sublimate gold. He then proceeded to study the process of degeneration and regeneration of the nervous system and the fine texture of the neuron and neuroglia.
  
  He discovered a new type of cell, to be named after him: the interstitial cell of Cajal (ICC). This cell is found interleaved among neurons embedded within the smooth muscles lining the gut, serving as the generator and pacemaker of the slow waves of contraction that move material along the gastrointestine, vitally mediating neurotransmission from motor nerves to smooth muscle cells.
  
  His original investigations of the microscopic structure of the brain made him a pioneer of modern neuroscience. Hundreds of his drawings illustrating the delicate arborizations of brain cells are still in use for educational and training purposes.
  
  In 1920 King Alfonso XIII of Spain commissioned the construction of the Cajal Institute in Madrid, where Ramón y Cajal worked until his death. Among his many books concerning nervous structure is Estudios sobre la degeneración y regeneración del sistema nervioso, 2 vol. (1913–14; The Degeneration and Regeneration of the Nervous System).
  
  Throughout his life he received numerous accolades for his work: school and research centres were named after him, he was awarded the Grand Cross of Isabel the Catholic (1890), Grand Cross of Alfonso XII (1902), the Moscow International Award (1900), and the Helmholtz gold medal from the Royal Academy of Berlin (1905). He was awarded honorary doctorates by the Universities of Cambridge (1893), Worcester (1899), Clark (1899), Boston (1899), Harvard (1899) and the Sorbonne (1924).
  
  Also, he succeeded in founding a Spanish school of histology, and his many distinguished pupils included P. del Rio-Hortega, F. de Castro, and R. Lorente de Nó.
  
  Nevertheless, the most famous distinction he was awarded was the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906 together with Italian Camillo Golgi "in recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous system". This was seen as quite controversial because Golgi, a stout reticularist, disagreed with Cajal in his view of the neuron doctrine.
  
  The asteroid 117413 Ramonycajal is named in his honor. The Spanish public television filmed a biopic series to commemorate his life.

Works

More photos

• book

  • New Ideas on the Structure of the Nervous System in Man and Vertebrates

    (This clear, direct, and accurate translation provides an ...)

    1894
  • Cajal on the Cerebral Cortex: An Annotated Translation of the Complete Writings (History of Neuroscience)

    (The new translations include all Cajal's very early contr...)

    1989
  • Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramon y Cajal

    (At the crossroads of art and science, this book presents ...)

    2017
  • Vacation Stories: Five Science Fiction Tales

    (Features five tales that take a microscopic look at the n...)

    1930
  • Santiago Ramon y Cajal: Ciencia y Arte - Science and Art

    (Visualization has always involved a partnership between s...)

    1880
  • Recuerdos de mi vida

    (Volume 1)

    1917
  • Life in the Year 6000: A Fantasy Dream 1880
  • La mujer. Psicologia del Quijote y el quijotismo 1944
  • Cajal: Recollections of My Life 1966
  • Advice for a Young Investigator 1897
  • Cajal's Degeneration and Regeneration of the Nervous System 1928
  • Reglas y consejos sobre investigación científica 1900
  • Manual de Histología Normal y de Técnica Micrográfica par Uso de Estudiantes 6.ª Edicíon Notablemente Aumentada 1914
  • Studies on vertebrate neurogenesis 1960
  • The Psychology of Don Quixote: and the Quixotic Ideal 1890
  • In the Aftermath of Peace: Essay on the Future of Europe 1896
  • Comparative Study of the Sensory Areas of the Human Cortex 1899
  • Histology 1930
  • Studies on the Diencephalon 1966
  • The Neuron and the Glial Cell 1934
  • Cuentos de Vacaciones: Narraciones Pseudocientificas 1905

Religion

Ramón y Cajal used the term soul "without any shame." He was said to later have regretted having left organized religion. Ultimately, he became convinced of a belief in God as a creator, as stated during his first lecture before the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences.

Views

As a young man, Cajal began looking at brains of all kinds - a one-month-old human infant, a man shortly after drowning, a pigeon, a rabbit - under a microscope, and sketching what he saw. He originally wanted to be an artist, but he pursued a medical degree at the urging of his father, who was a doctor. Nevertheless, he remained fascinated by the aesthetic aspects of his scientific career.

The picture of Ramón y Cajal that emerges from his own writings is full and candid. Interested in things rather than people, dedicated to neurohistology to the point of obsession, and prepared to submit his wife and family, at least in the earlier years, to considerable hardship while he financed his own laboratory and publications, Ramón y Cajal appears as proud, ashamed of his country’s administrative inefficiency, corruption, and scientific backwardness, ambivalent in that he recognized the need to publish in one of the major scientific languages of Europe, but resented foreign ignorance of the language of Cervantes, and intensely patriotic and determined that Spain should have a place on the scientific and intellectual stage.

Quotations: “I started investigating the sources of my mind after college. I studied Comparative Literature. I knew nothing about science. Then I had, for lack of a better term, a nervous breakdown. One doctor sketched a neuron for me on a cocktail napkin. It looked like a stupid cartoon. I coopted the theory of reductive materialism to identify some concrete object for me to blame. Modern neuroscience seems to believe that the mind emerges from the brain. My life was in shambles, and so it had to be my brain’s fault.”

“[T]he pyramidal cells, which can multiply their branches thanks to intelligent cultivation, send their roots deeper, and produce more exquisite flowers and fruits every day.”

"As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery."

"Buffon said unreservedly, "Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme." To those who asked how he achieved fame he replied: "By spending forty years of my life bent over my writing desk.”

"Genius, like the inhabitants of the depths of the sea, moves by its own light."

"Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes... The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it more bearable. In contrast, the patriot sacrifices a rather substantial part of humanity for the sake of his own prestige. His statue is always erected on a pedestal of ruins and corpses... In contrast, all humanity crowns a scholar, love forms the pedestal of his statues, and his triumphs defy the desecration of time and the judgment of history."

"I would be the last to deny that the greatest scientific pioneers belonged to an aristocracy of the spirit and were exceptionally intelligent, something that we as modest investigators will never attain, no matter how much we exert ourselves. Nevertheless … I continue to believe that there is always room for anyone with average intelligence … to utilize his energy and … any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain, and that even the least gifted may, like the poorest land that has been well-cultivated and fertilized, produce an abundant harvest."

"If a photographic plate under the center of a lens focused on the heavens is exposed for hours, it comes to reveal stars so far away that even the most powerful telescopes fail to reveal them to the naked eye. In a similar way, time and concentration allow the intellect to perceive a ray of light in the darkness of the most complex problem."

"If a solution fails to appear … and yet we feel success is just around the corner, try resting for a while. … Like the early morning frost, this intellectual refreshment withers the parasitic and nasty vegetation that smothers the good seed. Bursting forth at last is the flower of truth."

"In my own view, some advice about what should be known, about what technical education should be acquired, about the intense motivation needed to succeed, and about the carelessness and inclination toward bias that must be avoided is far more useful than all the rules and warnings of theoretical logic."

"In summary, all great work is the fruit of patience and perseverance, combined with tenacious concentration on a subject over a period of months or years."

"In the study of this membrane [the retina] I for the first time felt my faith in Darwinism (hypothesis of natural selection) weakened, being amazed and confounded by the supreme constructive ingenuity revealed not only in the retina and in the dioptric apparatus of the vertebrates but even in the meanest insect eye... I felt more profoundly than in any other subject of study the shuddering sensation of the unfathomable mystery of life."

"Intellectual beauty is sufficient unto itself, and only for it rather than for the future good of humanity does the scholar condemn himself to arduous and painful labors."

"Intellectual work is an act of creation. It is as if the mental image that is studied over a period of time were to sprout appendages like an ameba - outgrowths that extend in all directions while avoiding one obstacle after another - before interdigitating with related ideas."

"It is best to attenuate the virulence of our adversaries with the chloroform of courtesy and flattery, much as bacteriologists disarm a pathogen by converting it into a vaccine."

"It is idle to dispute with old men. Their opinions, like their cranial sutures, are ossified."

"It is notorious that the desire to live increases as life itself shortens."

"Like an earthquake, true senility announces itself by trembling and stammering."

"Nothing inspires more reverence and awe in me than an old man who knows how to change his mind."

"Our novice runs the risk of failure without additional traits: a strong inclination toward originality, a taste for research, and a desire to experience the incomparable gratification associated with the act of discovery itself."

"Physical pain is easily forgotten, but a moral chagrin lasts indefinitely."

"That which enters the mind through reason can be corrected. That which is admitted through faith, hardly ever."

"The history of civilization proves beyond doubt just how sterile the repeated attempts of metaphysics to guess at nature’s laws have been. Instead, there is every reason to believe that when the human intellect ignores reality and concentrates within, it can no longer explain the simplest inner workings of life’s machinery or of the world around us."

"The indescribable pleasure - which pales the rest of life's joys - is abundant compensation for the investigator who endures the painful and persevering analytical work that precedes the appearance of the new truth, like the pain of childbirth. It is true to say that nothing for the scientific scholar is comparable to the things that he has discovered. Indeed, it would be difficult to find an investigator willing to exchange the paternity of a scientific conquest for all the gold on earth. And if there are some who look to science as a way of acquiring gold instead of applause from the learned, and the personal satisfaction associated with the very act of discovery, they have chosen the wrong profession."

"There are no small problems. Problems that appear small are large problems that are not understood."

"To bring scientific investigation to a happy end once appropriate methods have been determined, we must hold firmly in mind the goal of the project. The object here is to focus the train of thought on more and more complex and accurate associations between images based on observation and ideas slumbering in the unconscious."

Membership

In 1877, the 25-year-old Ramón y Cajal joined a Masonic lodge. Later in life, Cajal was a member of the following: Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Madrid (1895); of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Madrid (1897); of the Spanish Society of Natural History and of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon (1897); Honorary Member of the Spanish Medical and Surgical Academy and also of several other Spanish societies.

Cajal was a corresponding member of several other societies: the Physical-Medical Society of Würzburg (1895); the Medical Society of Berlin (1895); the Society of Medical Sciences of Lisbon (1896); the Vienna Society for Psychiatry and Neurology (1896); the Society of Biology of Paris (1887); the National Medical Academy of Lima (1897); Conimbricensis Instituti Societas (Coimbra, 1898); and Member of Honour of the Italian Psychiatric Society (1896) as well as of the Medical Society of Ghent (Belgium, 1900). In 1906 he was elected an Associate Member of the Academy of Medicine, Paris; in 1916 he became a member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was also a member of the Royal Photographic Society of Madrid and served as its Honorary President in 1890.

• 

  Lisbon Academy of Sciences , Portugal

  1897 - 1934

• 

  Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences , Spain

  1895 - 1934

• 

  Masonic lodge , United Kingdom

  1877 - 1934

Personality

Cajal was an excellent teacher, painter, photographer, and writer. His medical artistry was legendary, and hundreds of his drawings illustrating the delicate arborizations of brain cells are still in use for educational and training purposes.

In his youth, Cajal was an excellent artist and gymnast, but his father neither appreciated nor encouraged these abilities, even though these artistic talents would contribute to his success later in life.

Interests

• photography, drawing, painting, writing

• Sport & Clubs

  gymnastics

Connections

In 1879 Ramón y Cajal married Silvería Fañanás García, a non-educated young woman, who stood at his side for the rest of their lives (she died in 1930). They had seven children (two of them died in their childhood).

Father:

Justo Ramon Casasus

1822–1903

Mother:

Antonia y Cajal

Wife:

Silvería Fañanás García

1854–1930

Brother:

Pedro Ramón y Cajal

1854–1950

collaborator:

Camillo Golgi

During the 19th century researchers learned to stain tissues to allow study under a microscope. In the 1870s Camillo Golgi discovered that nerve cells could be stained with silver nitrate. This led to groundbreaking studies of how the nervous system is structured and functions. Golgi maintained that all nerve cells in the nervous system constituted a continuous, interconnected network.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1906 was awarded jointly to Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal "in recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous system."

pupil:

Pio Hortega

pupil:

Rafael Lorente de Nó

Rafael Lorente de Nó (April 8, 1902 – April 2, 1990) was a Spanish neuroscientist who advanced the scientific understanding of the nervous system with his seminal research. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

References

• Cajal's Butterflies of the Soul: Science and Art
  2009
• Santiago Ramón y Cajal
  2014
• The Dreams of Santiago Ramón y Cajal
  2016
• The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought
  2009
• Golgi: A Biography of the Founder of Modern Neuroscience
  2009