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Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934)

1906 Physiology or Medicine

In recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous system.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal was born in the village of Petilla de Aragón, Spain, the son of an anatomy professor at the University of Saragossa. Although a quiet and intelligent boy, Cajal did not dedicate himself to his studies, preferring the arts, and his father did nothing to encourage his son’s emerging vocation. Justo Ramón Cajal, in fact, did everything he could to take him away from the world of the pencil and the paintbrush, even forcing the boy to apprentice to a barber and a shoemaker.

However, Cajal went on to study medicine at Saragossa, where his drawing skills served him well in anatomical studies, and in 1873 he joined the expeditionary army as a doctor. Sent to Cuba, where the Spanish were fighting against an independence movement, he contracted several serious diseases, including malaria and dysentery, which almost cost him his life. On his return to Spain he quickly recovered and, encouraged by his once skeptical father, decided to continue his studies. Cajal failed twice before becoming a professor of descriptive anatomy in 1883 at the University of Valencia, where he began a career as a researcher in the field of histology.

In 1887 he entered University of Barcelona as professor of normal histology and pathological anatomy, but he did not lose his enthusiasm for research and concentrated on the study of the nervous system. By showing that nerve cells are independent units and are related to each other through their long fibrous extensions, Cajal lay the foundation of modern neuroscience. This theory led to the theory of polarization, which describes how the nervous impulse is transmitted in one direction only, passing through the axon to the dendrites and then to the rest of the cell body.

Cajal transferred to the University of Madrid in 1892, which marked the beginning of a new stage in his research — a concentration on the interior of nerve cells and the brain. This exhaustive research was published in his most important work, the Textura del sistema nervioso del hombre y de los vertebrados (Textbook on the Nervous System of Man and the Vertebrates), which is still considered the most complete neurohistological portrait ever published. At this time he was already considered a highly respected researcher by his foreign colleagues, having received the Moscow Prize, established by the Congress of Moscow, from the International Congress of Medicine in Paris in 1900 and the Helmholtz Medal from the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin in 1905.

He died in the Madrid Laboratory for Biological Investigation, which was created for him in 1901.

Camillo Golgi also received half of the prize.