Santiago Ramon y Cajal

Born: May 1, 1852 in Navarre, Spain
Died: October 18, 1934 in Madrid, Spain

Education and Work

In early life Ramon y Cajal had disciplinary problems which led to him having to change schools often.
He was an apprentice to a barber and then to a cobbler, but his wish was to be an artist.
His father was an Anatomy professor at the University of Saragossa (Spain), and he pushed Ramon y Cajal to study medicine.
He became a medical officer for the Spanish Army.
In 1877 he received his doctorate degree in medicine at Madrid and started teaching at the University of Valencia.
In 1880 he began to publish in scientific works. During his career he published well over 100 articles in Spanish, French, English and German focusing mostly on the fine structure of the nervous system.
In 1887 appointed professor of Histology and Pathological Anatomy at Barcelona.
In 1900 he was appointed Director of the National Institute of Hygiene and of the Institute of Biological Research in Madrid.
In 1906 he received the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine; he decided to share it with Camillo Golgi claiming that without Golgi’s findings, his own would have been impossible.

His most noted works were on the structure of the central nervous system.
He established the Neuron Doctrine which states that: Neural cells are not a web but rather that neurons are discrete and autonomous cells that communicate with one another through special junctions. The junctions through which neurons communicate are called synapses. Information is transferred in one direction (from dendrites to axon).
His findings have paved the way to give rise to many fields in psychology like clinical, neurobiological, and comparative.