The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron by Benjamin Ehrlich

Author:Benjamin Ehrlich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

“For the histologist,” Cajal declared, “every progress in staining technique comes to be something like the acquisition of a new sense open to the unknown.”

* * *

As a consequence of Cajal’s Moscow Prize victory, the 1903 International Congress of Medicine was held in Madrid, and thousands of doctors descended on the Spanish capital. In the lobby of the Institute for Biological Research, Cajal set up microscopes to show the attendees his findings, just as he had fourteen years earlier in Berlin. He and Simarro displayed sections of brain tissue as scientists roamed the hall, chatting and sipping beer. Cajal was determined to prove, beyond any doubt, that his views on neurofibrils were “absolutely objective.” His speech at the conference was a polemic against Bethe, whose views amounted to “panreticularism, a kind of ocean where nervous currents pour out and all channels become confused.” If Bethe’s theory is true, Cajal said, then histologists should hang a sign above their laboratories with the inscription from the entrance to Hell in Dante’s Inferno: Lasciate ogni speranza—“Abandon all hope.”

Also at the congress was the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, director of the Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine in Saint Petersburg, where he was conducting experiments on gastric function in dogs. In the vote for the 1900 Moscow Prize, Pavlov finished second to Cajal, earning six votes to Cajal’s fourteen. Pavlov spoke after Cajal, reading from a paper titled “Experimental Method as a New and Extremely Fruitful Method of Physiological Research,” written in perfect German, which he pronounced with difficulty. For the first time in public, Pavlov discussed the effects of conditioned reflexes on the psyche. “Essentially one thing in life is of real interest to us—our psychical experience,” Pavlov declared. His goal was to “explain the mechanism and vital meaning of that which most occupies man— our consciousness and its torments.” Pavlov and Cajal asked the same questions, one by way of psychology and the other anatomy. “Now we must learn Russian,” one attendee of the congress said, “just as we have been obliged to learn Spanish in order to follow Ramón y Cajal’s papers in Madrid.” Four years later, Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for the work that he first presented in Madrid.

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