The Father of Neuroscience – Santiago Ramón y Cajal Facts

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, known as the “Father of Neuroscience” because of his contributions, was a Spanish histologist. He proved that nerve cells were separate units of the nervous system. He devised a gold stain to analyse the intricate structure of nerve tissues. Ramón y Cajal could observe the courses of neurons in vast tissue samples because of the gold stain, which distinguished cell types. He inferred that “contact zones” held every single neuron together and theorised that these cell pathways were polarised. Hundreds of pictures depicting the microscopic structure of cells in the brain were also developed by him. 

Santiago Ramón y Cajal was the first to describe the fine structure of the nervous system with clarity. Santiago Ramón y Cajal contributions include demonstrations that the nervous system is made up of single cells known as neurons connected by small contact zones, which was crucial in the development of the neuron doctrine. 

A Look Into the Young Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Santiago Ramón y Cajal facts state that his talent for transforming visual images into drawings and his passion for sketching became the trademarks of his subsequent scientific endeavours. As a young student, Cajal was possessed by a “graphic craze,” was particularly fond of athletics and philosophy, restless, shy, energetic, and alone, and finally got accepted into the medical school at Zaragoza. In 1873, he received his medical degree from the University of Zaragoza. He was conscripted and assigned as a medical director to Cuba, which was still under Spanish sovereignty at the time. Cajal returned to Spain unwell developing malaria and tuberculosis in Cuba, and began his academic career as an “Auxiliary Professor” of Anatomy at the Zaragoza University at the end of 1875. 

Early Life and Education 

On May 1, 1852, Santiago Ramón y Cajal was born in Petilla de Aragón, in northern Spain. His mother’s name was Antonia Cajal. His father, Justo Ramón Casas, was a surgeon and Applied Anatomy Professor. Ramón y Cajal was a naughty young man who got himself into a lot of trouble at school. His family tried many schools in the hopes of finding one where he would calm down and behave correctly. He was an excellent draughtsman, but he despised the monks’ harsh and occasionally violent discipline in his schools. 

His anatomist father took the 16-year-old kid to cemeteries, where the bones of older burials had come to the surface in the summer of 1868. His father believed that by sketching the bones, he could pique his son’s interest in anatomy. Ramón y Cajal entered to study medicine at the Zaragoza University, where his father was a professor, in 1868, due to his father’s ruse. Under his father’s tutelage, he excelled in university and honed his dissection skills. He was so outstanding that he was hired as a dissection assistant professor 3 years into his course. He also received an award for being the best student. Ramón y Cajal graduated from medical school in 1873 after five years of study. He had earned the right to practice medicine. At the time, he was only 21 years old. Soon after, he was drafted into the army.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s Time In the Army 

After some months in the army, Ramón y Cajal was accepted into the Medical Corps, despite the fact that there were much more applications than slots available. His army regiment travelled to the Spanish colony of Cuba in 1874, where the Ten Years’ War had been fought since 1868. He was sent back to Spain the next year after a tropical nightmare in Cuba. At the time, he had dysentery and malaria, nearly killing him. After leaving the army, he lived in the hills of the Pyrenees Mountains in northern Spain with his sisters and mother.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal Contribution Neuroscience

Santiago Ramón y Cajal contributions were always represented in a functional context. According to one of his most profound hypotheses, electrical impulses pass from dendrites through the cell body to the axon. To fulfil their varied roles, he correctly regarded neurons as data processing units that create interconnections and form dynamic networks. 

He was appointed Director of the University of Zaragoza’s Faculty of Medicine’s Anatomical Museum in 1879. He transferred to the University of Valencia’s Faculty of Medicine in 1883 to become Director of Descriptive Anatomy. He studied cholera, inflammation, and the structure of epithelial substances early in his career. In 1887, he was appointed to the University of Barcelona’s chair of pathological and histological anatomy. It was here that he began to employ Golgi’s Method in earnest, leading to his Nobel Prize. 

Apart from these publications, Cajal has published over 100 articles in scientific journals in both Spanish and French, focusing on the fine structure of the central nervous, particularly the spinal cord and brain, but also muscles and other tissues, as well as numerous topics in general pathology. 

Conclusion 

For their study on the structure of the nerve system, he and Camillo Golgi shared the Nobel Prize in 1906. Cajal was invited to present the Royal Society’s Croonian Lecture in March 1904 and to Clark University (Worcester, Massachusetts, United States of America) in 1899 to give three lectures on the organisation of the human brain and recent investigations on the subject. 

Cajal married Doa Silvera Faanás Garca in 1879. They had four sons and three daughters. Ramón y Cajal’s approach to scientific study was informed by his lifelong passion for photography and painting. Learning about anatomy became a visual experience for Ramón y Cajal only when he began dissection of cadavers with his father (a medical lab assistant and physician) in 1868 and got him interested in science.