Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the Father of Neuroscience

Wandering through the streets of Barcelona, you’re likely to come across the name Ramón y Cajal: there’s a school, a street, and more. You’ll also find tributes to him in cities around Spain, including Valencia, Zargoza, Madrid and Granada. He spent time in several cities around the country in pursuit of his scientific vision, and each one of these cities likes to claim him as a favorite son. 

So, Who Was He? A Politician? A Writer?

At Carrer del Notariat 7, there’s a plaque in Catalan that says: “In this house, S. Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) in 1888 discovered the theory of the neuron. The city remembers him on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.” Not a politician, not a writer: Santiago Ramón y Cajal was a scientific genius commonly referred to as the father of neuroscience, or as one journalist put it, the “cartographer of the brain.”

Early Life

He was born in the small town of Petilla de Aragón (Navarra) on May 1, 1852. Ramón y Cajal’s father, Justo Ramón Casasús, was a respected local surgeon, and his mother was named Antonia. The couple had no idea that their baby boy would grow up to win the Nobel Prize for science, putting Spain at the forefront of international medicine for the first time. 

He was known as a rebellious student who wasn’t interested in memorization, a condition probably exacerbated by the clash between his freethinking nature and the authoritarian educational methods of that era. Frequent moves from town to town due to his father’s work also meant changing schools repeatedly during his childhood.

He finished high school in Huesca—in later years, the school he attended was renamed IES Ramón y Cajal—and began studying medicine at the University of Zaragoza in 1870. He graduated three years later, and almost immediately, he began his mandatory military service under the flag of the short-lived First Spanish Republic. The young scientist was sent to faraway Cuba, which was a Spanish province fighting for its independence at the time, in what would be known as the Ten Years’ War. His posting, the Vistahermosa military infirmary in the province of Camagüey, was in the middle of the jungle, and the unsanitary conditions and corruption amongst the military officers made for trying circumstances. He was sent back to Spain just a few months after his arrival, suffering from muscle atrophy, malnutrition and severe fatigue as a result of having contracted malaria.

However physically and psychologically challenging it might have been, his time in the military enabled him to save enough money to purchase some basic scientific equipment, including a microscope, and set up a small laboratory when he got home to Spain.

Post-War: From Zaragoza to Barcelona

Upon recovering from his illness, Ramón y Cajal began assisting his father with private medical patients at the Nuestra Señora de Gracia Hospital in Zaragoza, where he also began his doctoral studies. He would finish his thesis, titled Pathogenesis of Inflammation, at the University of Zarazoza the age of 25. At 27, he became the director of the Anatomical Museum in that city, and at 30, he was offering the position of the Chair of Descriptive Anatomy at the University of Valencia, where his father had studied. There he made one of his first major scientific breakthroughs: he dedicated himself to studying cholera, and developed a vaccine for it.

Five years later, in 1887, he moved to Barcelona to become the new Chair of Histology, a new department created at the University of Barcelona. (At the time, all departments under the umbrella of the Faculty of Medicine were located on Carrer de Carme, in a neoclassical building that now houses the Royal Academy of Medicine.) His first home in the city was on Carrer de la Riera Alta, which soon grew too small for his growing family—during that period of his life, he and his wife had a child every year—and they later moved to the apartment on Carrer de Notariat.

He often wrote and spoke about his wife, Silveria Fañanas, whom he had married in 1880. He repeatedly stated that she not only made his work possible by efficiently running a large household on a professor’s salary, but that she also helped make him a better, more balanced person in every possible way.

Revolutionizing How We See the Human Brain

The year 1888 was an important year for Barcelona in general: It was the year of the Universal Exhibition, which brought representatives from 30 countries to the city, and the modernista art, architecture and design movement was in full swing. This was also the year when Ramón y Cajal made yet another discovery, one of the biggest in medical history.

He postulated that the brain and the nervous system are composed of countless individual cells that communicate with one another, but which do not touch. The concept would become known as the “neuron doctrine,” and it was revolutionary because it refuted the commonly-accepted explanation of how the nervous system works; known as the reticular model, it described the nervous system as one vast, interconnected web or nerve “net,” rather than as individual cells that “talk” to one another. 

Not only did he discover and explain the existence of neurons, he also theorized that neurons do not touch: that the infinitesimally small space between neurons, called the synaptic cleft, is where the actual communication between cells occurs. His explanation of how two neurons “reach” towards one another to create a synapse, via protuberances from the cell body called dendrites, was only able to be confirmed in the 1950s using an electron microscope. 

Ramón y Cajal was a thinker ahead of his time, and his numerous discoveries would change medicine forever. The neuron doctrine, along with the 19th-century doctrine of functional localization—essentially, the idea that different parts of the brain are responsible for different functions—are the two main tenets of neuroanatomy. 

Literally Drawing Conclusions 

The generations of scientists before Ramón y Cajal were limited by the capacities of their instruments; more modern microscopes with compound lenses enabled tissue samples to be examined at higher resolutions, as well as the examination of individual cells within samples.

Using one of these advanced microscopes and histology methods—which is “the study of tissues and organs through sectioning, staining, and examining those sections under a microscope”—to example samples of both human and animal tissue, he drew freehand what he saw through the lens. These drawings would form the basis of modern neuroscience, and lead to our understanding of many aspects of human anatomy such as, for example, the function of the retina in the eye.

However, he wouldn’t have been able to see what he saw had it not been for the unique tissue staining method created by Italian scientist Camilo Golgi. This method used a combination of potassium dichromate and silver nitrate to treat the tissue, dying the neuron cells black while leaving the surrounding cells transparent; as a result, it’s sometimes referred to as the “black reaction technique.” It offered significantly clearer images than previous tissue staining techniques, which could sometimes damage or distort the samples. Ramón y Cajal was able to see the neurons and their tiny, branching dendrites clearly. Over time, he painstakingly illustrated a detailed catalog of various parts of the human brain and nervous system, as well as countless drawings of the neurons in animal tissue. 

Now that he could clearly see the structure of the brain, he could try to explain how it functioned. Ramón y Cajal’s model was the only one that offered a possible explanation for the unidirectional transmission of the nervous impulse, which is a vital part of understanding the mechanics of not only physical sensations, but also of thought and memory. He was also one of the first to argue that the nervous system exhibits obvious signs of plasticity, meaning that the brain creates new connections and neural structures in order to adapt to its environment. 

His neuron theory was accepted on an international level at the Congress of the German Anatomical Society in Berlin in 1889, which helped to disseminate Ramón y Cajal’s research on an international scale. The word “neuron” was later popularized by German scientist Heinrich Wilhelm Gottfried von Waldeyer-Hartz.

Even though Camilo Golgi was an adherent of the reticular theory, not Ramón y Cajal’s neuron doctrine, the latter wouldn’t have been able to make his discoveries without the work of the former. The two scientists were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906.

Later Life and Legacy

Ramón y Cajal would win numerous prizes and honors for his scientific discoveries. The year after he won the Nobel Prize, he was nominated President of the Board for the Expansion of Biological Studies and Research—a division of the Spanish Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts—a post which he held until his death. During that time, he encouraged scientific modernization and advancement in the country, as well as structural modifications to the Spanish educational system. He founded the Cajal Institute in Madrid in 1920, which later became part of the largest neuroscience research body in Spain in 1939. The Institute’s ongoing goal is to advance all areas of neuroscience, both in terms of “normal” functions as well as brain disorders, through research and international collaboration, with an eye on the beneficial impact of science on society.

He was respected for his deep thinking, both within his field and outside of it. In the words of writer Juan Ramón Jiménez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956: "I don't know of any brain that’s as ‘ours’ as his: strong, delicate, sensitive, bold, thoughtful.”

Not only was Ramón y Cajal the first Spanish scientist to win the Nobel Prize for science, he was also a painter, philosopher, inventor, writer and photographer. Over the course of his life, he would publish numerous books and over 200 articles on subjects ranging from science to art to chromatic photography; in 1890, he was named Honorary President of the Royal Photographic Society of Madrid. And his book Rules and Advice on Scientific Research, published in 1897 and subtitled The Tonics of the Will, offered opinions on everything from the right kind of romantic partner for a scientific researcher to patriotism, and from education to personal growth. 

The great thinker died in 1934—he was survived by five of his children, two other children and his wife having passed on before him—but his work lives on, and continues to inspire. 

In 2017, his personal archives of scientific drawings, manuscripts, paintings, photos and letters were included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. Since then, there have been calls for this archive of the “cartographer of the brain” to be housed in a permanent museum dedicated to his work. In 2020, people from six countries around the world collaborated on the Cajal Embroidery Project sponsored by Edinburgh University, which created over 80 embroidery pieces based on Ramón y Cajal’s drawings. These were shown at scientific conventions such as the Virtual Forum of the European Federation of Neuroscience Societies, and published on the covers of the Lancent Neurology magazine.