Exhibit honors Spanish Nobelist on 50th anniversary of death

Abstract

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934). To honor Cajal, the American Academy of Neurology presented an exhibit of his works— including histology drawings, photographs, and slide preparations—at its annual meeting in Boston. Cajal, who in 1906 shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Camillo Golgi, is best known for the improvement and application of Golgi's silver nitrate stain, which provided him with evidence that neurons are the basic signaling unit of the nervous system. This neuron doctrine, as it came to be called, refuted the earlier reticular theory that envisioned neuronal processes (axons and dentrites) ending in a network of enmeshed fibers rather than in distinct synapses. Cajal's accomplishments were commemorated on two Spanish postage stamps—one in 1934, the year of his death, and the other in 1952, the centennial of his birth—and on a Swedish stamp in