Cajal is considered the founder of modern neuroscience. Historians have ranked him alongside Darwin and Pasteur as one of the greatest biologists of the 19th century and among Copernicus, Galileo and Newton as one of the greatest scientists of all time. His masterpiece, Texture of the Nervous System of Man and the Vertebrates, is a foundational text for neuroscience, comparable to On the Origin of Species for evolutionary biology. Cajal was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his work on the structure of neurons, whose birth, growth, decline and death he studied with devotion and even a kind of compassion, almost as though they were human beings. “The mysterious butterflies of the soul,” Cajal called them, “whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.” He produced thousands of drawings of neurons, as beautiful as they are complex, which are still printed in neuroanatomy textbooks and exhibited in art museums.
