The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Benjamin Ehrlich

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

Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur and Marie Curie are names from the annals of 19th century science most anyone will recognize. But mention Santiago Ramón y Cajal? Blank stares?

With The Brain in Search of Itself, Benjamin Ehrlich has written the first English-language biography of the Spanish scientist and 1906 Nobel Prize winner. Cajal was given the award for his work on the structure of neurons and their role in the functioning of the brain.

The Brain in Search of Itself is remarkable given the poverty of sources on Cajal’s early years, comprised of scattered autobiographical musings and occasional reminiscences from those who knew him. He was born in a remote village in 19th century Spain, a backwater in a nation that was a backwater for scientific research. He was a rebellious child from a harsh upbringing. His father was a “freethinker,” an aspiring physician from a poor background who educated his son with brutality. His cruelty was ameliorated by his religious Roman Catholic mother, who doted on him. The Catholic schools Cajal attended were scarcely less cruel than his father.

In today’s terms, with STEM all the rage in education, Cajal would be an advocate of STEAM—Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math. It was said that Cajal “entered the Castle of Science through the door of Art. With his father denouncing artists as loafers and parasites, Cajal drew pictures on the sly. He understood the world around him visually.

Despite so many disadvantages, and a temperament that tolerated few fools, Cajal became a prominent medical researcher in his own country as his work gained notice around the world. Art aided science as he drew and painted the layers of brain tissue he painstakingly observed under the microscope. Cajal believed that the purpose of art was to raise awareness.

Ehrlich describes Cajal in terms that sometimes suggest a mad scientist at work. “Swayed by barbiturates and sleeplessness, he would convince himself that his ideas were too precious to waste,” Ehrlich writes. As Cajal lay in bed, he scribbled down thoughts and dream fragments, covering his bedroom floor with scraps of paper, the backs of envelopes, torn-out notebook pages. “Once the mania had dissipated, he would plummet into a depression and spend the next day crossing out what he had written the night before.”

In gathering anecdotes about Cajal, Ehrlich doesn’t try to iron out the contradictions of a recluse who enjoyed company, a republican who respected his king. Cajal’s life and methods were eccentric but his discoveries were a steppingstone on the long road of neuroscience whose end point remains elusively beyond reach nearly a century after his death.