Santiago Ramón y Cajal wanted to be an artist and photographer, but his physician father encouraged him to go into the medical profession. Even working in neuroscience, the Spaniard’s interest in visual art ended up proving essential, and his illustrations continue to appear in textbooks and medical literature. The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, out now from Abrams Books, accompanies a traveling exhibition that opened this January at the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota and was organized with the Cajal Institute in Madrid, Spain. Both the book and the show concentrate on 80 visualizations of the human brain by Cajal, often ordained the “father of modern neuroscience.”
Cajal was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906, yet he remains obscure compared to 19th-century scientists such as Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur. Neuroscientist Larry W. Swanson writes in a book essay that this may be “because there is no simple means to encapsulate how Cajal and his contemporaries explained and illustrated the workings of the brain as a biological network in an entirely new way, a way that remains foundational to neuroscientists today.” Indeed, not every viewer will understand how he was able to discern the information flow of neurons in the retina just by studying specimens through a microscope, but with their clean lines and directional indications, the illustrations are visually striking.
From Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s autobiography
Like the entomologist in pursuit of brightly colored butterflies, my attention hunted, in the flower garden of the gray matter [the cerebral cortex], cells with delicate and elegant forms, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, the beating of whose wings may someday — who knows? — clarify the secret of mental life.
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