LONG BEFORE MRIS, SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y CAJAL REVEALED THE INNER WORKINGS OF THE BRAIN

By Jeff Goldberg

Self-portrait of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, taken by Cajal in his laboratory in Valencia when he was in his early thirties, c. 1885. Courtesy of Cajal Institute (CSIC), Madrid.

A century ago, alone in a cluttered private laboratory at his home in Madrid, Santiago Ramón y Cajal was exploring a new world. Its exotic trees and ferns sported branches and roots that intertwined in dense lattices, while strange, one-eyed creatures wrapped filamentous tentacles around each other. Although the strangeness of this landscape surpassed even the science fiction books Cajal favored, it was no fantasy. Through the lens of his microscope, he was looking at the world of the brain—the complex circuits of nerve cells, called neurons, that give rise to our senses, our emotions, and perhaps even to consciousness itself.

Cajal painstakingly mapped this “neuronal jungle” in exquisitely detailed drawings, charting the features of different types of brain cells, their stages of growth, and how they are organized. His hands became “precision instruments,” he once said, producing “strange drawings, with details that measure thousandths of a millimeter…[that] reveal the mysterious worlds of the architecture of the brain.”

Now, American viewers are getting a chance to see Cajal’s drawings for the first time. An exhibition titled “The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal” is currently on view at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery; it will move to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in April. The show, which features some 80 drawings—most of which have never been seen outside Spain—illuminates Cajal’s fantastic voyage into the brain. Layers of interconnected cells, labeled with arrows and letters, demonstrate how sights and sounds are conveyed by nerve impulses from the outer cells of the eye and ear to cells deep inside the cerebral cortex. The complexity and delicacy of the drawings are simultaneously amazing and uncanny, observed Roberta Smith in the New York Times: “It’s not often that you look at an exhibition with the help of the very apparatus that is its subject.”

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Glial cells of the mouse spinal cord, 1899. Courtesy of Cajal Institute (CSIC), Madrid.

“The Beautiful Brain” dramatically reveals the twin aspects of Cajal’s genius: the scientific brilliance that earned him a Nobel Prize and recognition as the father of modern neuroscience, and his unique artistic gifts—without which his monumental discoveries might have gone unnoticed. 

Santiago Ramón y Cajal was born in 1852 in Petilla de Aragón, a small farming village in northeastern Spain. Growing up, Cajal had a passion for drawing and dreamed of becoming an artist. “I had an irresistible mania for scribbling on paper,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Translating my dreams onto paper, with my pencil as a magic wand, I constructed a world according to my own fancy.”

His father, the local doctor, considered art to be frivolous entertainment and fiercely opposed his son’s professional aspirations. Eventually, he persuaded the boy to assist him in a human anatomy class he was teaching at the medical school in Zaragoza. Cajal found that he enjoyed studying the human body and that he could put his exceptional drawing skills to good use in the process. He enrolled in medical school in Zaragoza and graduated in 1873, at age 21, with the intention of devoting his career to histology—the microscopic examination of body tissues…………….

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-long-mris-artist-scientist-revealed-inner-workings-brain?utm_medium=email&utm_source=12585603-newsletter-editorial-daily-03-18-18&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=st-