ABSTRACT
Santiago Ramon y Cajal is the father of modern neuroscience. His work led to the formulation of the neuron doctrine, which holds that nerve cells form the fundamental structural and functional units of the nervous system. At the age of 35, in 1887, Cajal moved to the University of Barcelona. It proved to be a turning point in Cajal's research life, for in the same year he was shown samples of nerve cells stained with the silver impregnation method. The cell's morphological features such as their dendrites could be viewed in unsurpassed clarity and axons followed through the nervous morass. Cajal also described the mossy fibres for the first time, which entered the cerebellum from an outside site and formed a relationship with the small dendrites of the granule cells. An obituary by the Italian neurologist Ernesto Lugaro eulogised that Cajal had contributed more to the knowledge of neuroscience than all the efforts of his fellow colleagues put together.
