SANTIAGO SAW THINGS DIFFERENTLY

An introduction to Santiago Ramón y Cajal, an artist and medical researcher who made a crucial discovery about how our nervous systems work.

Iverson drafts a portrait of a visionary Spanish scientist who, compulsively drawing and painting from childhood on but compelled by his father to study medicine, was therefore well equipped to see patterns in networks of neurons and axons that others could not. He described and depicted them well enough to change scientific thinking on the way to earning a Nobel Prize in 1906. Lozano incorporates numerous examples of his subject’s actual artwork into scenes of a determined-looking lad in short pants finding ways to make art (with pen, brush, and, later, a camera) in the face of opposition from both his father and his teachers. Later, as an adult, he translated images seen through a microscope into complex but lucid arrangements of cells and connections. Along with more information about nerve cells’ structures and functions, the author offers readers further details about the life and accomplishments of, as she dubs him, the “Father of Neuroscience,” in an afterword—including an amusing anecdote about how his co-Nobelist, Camillo Golgi, spent most of his acceptance speech at the ceremony arguing that his colleague’s theories were wrong. Some nerve!

Brightly illuminates a brilliant and multitalented yet unjustly obscure scientist.