Don Quixote of the Microscope: An Interpretation of the Spanish Savant Santiago Ramon Y Cajal [1852-1934]

by Harley Williams

Ramon y Cajal, the great Spanish biologist and a winner of the Nobel Prize , was an outstanding figure in European culture, quite apart from his scientific work. After developing malaria while on military service and tuberculosis at home, Ramon y Cajal brought his first micrscope, and helped to found the science of histology, which studies the tissues of the body. This brought him fame and manydistinctions. He was a philosopher, an autobiographer, and above all an incomparable draugjtsman and illustrator. His drawings of the brain cell are like etchings, and show a mastery as great as his command of the microscopic technique upon which they were based. This book is for the general reader. No one need to be daunted by feeling it would be too 'technical', since Cajal's researches are descrbied in non-technical terms. An idosyncratic Spaniard, he was not only a great European biologist; he was a visionary of science, and is rightly called Don Quixote of the Microscope.

255 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1954