Golgi versus Cajal: holism versus reductionism at the dawn of the neurosciences

Abstract

Abstract In 1891, while Golgi was making a last attempt to convince his critics of the reality of the diffuse neural net, Cajal and van Gehuchten developed a physiological model in which dendrites, cell body, and axon played well-defined roles in the mechanism of nervous transmission. In contrast to the static model propounded by His Sr and Forel, Cajal was in fact propounding a more dynamic vision of the nerve cell, and van Gehuchten moved in the same direction, albeit with some small differences. We have seen that Cajal began to hint at the idea of directional flow of nerve currents in 1889 while investigating the relationship between the basket cells and Purkinje cells. Two years later, this vague intuition became the ‘law of dynamic polarization’, according to which the dendrites (and the cell body as well) receive nerve impulses, which are then transmitted to the cylindraxis (the conduction apparatus), which in turn distributes them to the terminal varicose arborization (emission apparatus).