17/04/2026
Take a look at this beautiful illustration of the nervous system by the founder of modern neuroscience.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who drew this image, shared the 1906 medicine prize with Camillo Golgi despite having very different ideas about the structure of the nervous system. They met only in Stockholm to receive the award. Golgi gave his Nobel Prize lecture first, which was later entirely contradicted by Cajal's Nobel Prize lecture.
Golgi believed that the nervous system was made of a continuous network of filaments, or a 'diffuse neural network'. However, Cajal thought it was made up of billions of separate nerve cells. His work led to the conclusion that the basic units of the nervous system were represented by individual cellular elements, which were later named neurons.
It is Cajal’s idea that formed the modern basic principle of the organisation of the nervous system, in which nerve synapses transfer nerve impulses from one nerve cell to another.
While Golgi’s idea has been proven to be incorrect, Cajal couldn’t have made his discovery without his rival. This is because his co-laureate developed a revolutionary staining technique in the 1870s that made it possible to colour nerve cells using silver nitrate. When Cajal first saw specimens stained using Golgi’s technique he said “I had an opportunity to admire … those famous sections of the brain impregnated by the silver method of the Savant of Pavia.”
Without Golgi’s method, he might not have been able to produce detailed illustrations of brain cells and prove that the nerve cell is the basic unit of the nervous system.
Learn more: https://bit.ly/40Zyabf
Illustration by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, courtesy Instituto Cajal CSIS via Nobel Prize Museum
