History of Medicine

One name that pops up frequently while studying neuroscience is Santiago Ramón y Cajal. His contributions to the field of neuroscience is so vast that he is aptly called the father of neuroscience. Cajal  won the Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine in 1906 for the neuron doctrine that became the basis of neuroscience. Interestingly, he shared the Nobel Prize with his arch rival, Camillo Golgi. Cajal's main contribution was identifying that neurons are individual cells that are biochemically distinct from each other, which directly contradicted the theories of Golgi and many other contemporaries. Cajal is considered one of history's most brilliant neuroanatomists, but his story is more inspiring than just his contributions to neuroscience. As a child, Cajal was very mischievous and often got into trouble in school. He had to change several schools and finally withdrew from school altogether. His father tried to apprentice him to a barber, then a cobbler, but nothing

Even though the origins of neuroscience can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, it remained a speculative science until the imaging of the neurons. The person who transformed the study of nerves to an experimental and observational science was Spanish physician Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Cajal’s images and drawings made such a profound contribution to the field of neuroscience that he is considered the Father of Neuroscience. Cajal (1852-1935) created nearly 3000 drawings of the nervous system, detailing its architecture, and unraveling the mysteries of neuroanatomy. Through his elaborate drawings of the nervous system, he showed that the brain is made up of individual cells called neurons. Until Cajal’s drawings, the common view was that the nervous system was a spider web-like structure of cells that behaved like a single unit. Cajal’s drawing of the neurons in a bird’s cerebellum Although Cajal used the tissue staining method developed by his contemporary, Camillo G