Santiago Ramón y Cajal - Neuroscientist & Artist

We read slightly about Santiago Ramón y Cajal in our textbook about how he came to be the Pioneer of Neuroscience. From Spain, Ramón y Cajal dreamt of the life as an artist, his father, however being a professor of Applied Anatomy, had a different plan for him and "convinced" him to study medicine. He began, after many examinations, as an army doctor, assistant at a school, then finally, at his own request, obtained his degree of Doctor of Medicine. After several different Professor and Director jobs at schools and museums, he began to publish scientific works. Cajal shortly after became the first neuroscientist to discover that the nervous system was not continuous but was comprised of interconnected individual cells.  

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"

Not only was Cajal an extremely brilliant scientist, but he still somewhat achieved his dream of becoming an amazing artist as well. "His detailed drawings are still considered definitive today."

This illustration was drawn from a histological stain of a human retinal cell and is one of the first drawings of a neuron. 

Depicting the cells of the retina. 

Now, I personally don't really understand the drawings, but they are still considered definitive today and it was amazing for Cajal to be able to come up with these during his time. It is said that he used to look at silver chromate stained neurons under the microscope before wandering across the street to the café where he would drink wine and draw what he had seen entirely from memory. 

"How many interesting facts fail to be converted into fertile discoveries because their first observers regard them as natural and ordinary things! It is strange to see how the populate, which nourishes its imagination with tales of witches or saints, mysterious events and extraordinary occurrences, disdains the world around it as commonplace, monotonous and prosaic, without suspecting that at bottom it is all secret, mystery, and marvel." Cajal.