Santiago Ramon y Cajal

Santiago Ramon y Cajal was a Spanish histologist and pathologist often called the father of modern neuroscience. Applying Camillo Golgi's own black reaction staining method, he argued that the nervous system is built from discrete, individually bounded cells, neurons, that communicate by contact rather than by fusing into a continuous network, the neuron doctrine that later evidence confirmed as the structural basis of the nervous system. A professor at the University of Madrid, he published his findings most fully in Histology of the Nervous System of Man and Vertebrates, illustrated throughout with his own detailed ink drawings of neural tissue. He shared the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Golgi, whose staining technique had made his own discoveries possible, despite Golgi's own opposed reticular theory of nervous structure.