The first ever neurologist is important as the first doctor or surgeon. This person laid the fundamentals for the advanced methods we use for medicine and technology/robotics, Santiago Ramón y Cajal. His groundbreaking discovery was finding out what actually happened inside the brain, thus leading to the term neuron.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal had a very hard time in school because he always thought he had to rebel and hate the strictness that his father put him through. He went to a medical school in Zaragoza, where he spent 4 years studying the human body, and mostly the brain. His father was a professor of anatomy at Zaragoza, where he forced his son to study on the medical side. All of his childhood trauma and suffering led to this amazing person.
Santiago studied for 50 years in total on the field of neuroscience. He was born on May 1, 1852, in Spain( In the future, he would retire in Spain, too). He moved to Valencia in 1883, where he got a job as a professor of anatomy at the University of Valencia. He received a Nobel Prize in 1906 for producing the term neuron. He perfected Golgi’s silver nitrate stain, which was a method to stain neurons black using potassium dichromate and silver nitrate. This was useful because it could help with wounds and also remove warts. Santiago improved it by making the result clearer, and he renamed it the reduced silver nitrate method.
Most scientists think that he was a very good neurologist since he proved so many people wrong. Furthermore, explains in Scientific American, “In the late 19th century, most scientists believed the brain was composed of a continuous tangle of fibres as serpentine as a labyrinth. Cajal produced the first clear evidence that the brain is composed of individual cells, later termed neurons, that are fundamentally the same as those that make up the rest of the living world.” This shows how smart and determined he was to try his theory, which was that the brain was made up of nerve cells, and prove to the scientists from 1888 what the brain was really made up of.
Cajal was also an outstanding artist, ever since he could hold a pencil or a brush. He utilised his artistic skills to aid him on his path to becoming a neurologist. In the Grey Art Museum, it states, “In them, he illustrated the inner workings of the nervous system, the connection between the brain and the retina, and the development of a living, maturing brain over time. Working freehand, Cajal summarised what he saw under the microscope rather than making exact copies. In a single sketch, he combined observations he had made at different times or obtained using various methods, thus illustrating a larger hypothesis.” Even though he couldn’t pursue his dream and passion of being an artist, he did, however, use the skill in his work, which was a win-win because his father wanted Cajal to take the medical side, and he wanted to take the artistic side.
His work influences modern neuroscience by laying out its foundations. Even though Cajal didn’t want to pursue his career as a neuroscientist and instead wanted to be an artist, he still made a significant impact on neuroscience today. His legacy of discovering neurons will always have an everlasting impact.