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In medical school, inspired by Jules Verne, he composed a novel about a miniature man on Jupiter. Deeply affected by Robinson Crusoe, he wrote and illustrated his own novel about a shipwreck survivor. Cajal found Dumas (père), Hugo, Cervantes, and Defoe while trespassing in the library of a neighbor. Although his father did not allow such distracting books at home, his mother secretly gave him cheap romance novels. As an adolescent, he enjoyed reading lyric poetry and tales of knight-errantry. His masterpiece, Textura del sistema nervioso del hombre y de los vertebrados (1899–1904), is a summary of twenty years spent looking through a microscope at “the world of the infinitely small.” It features more than a thousand original illustrations and is still cited frequently in the scientific literature.Ĭajal had a lifelong relationship with the literature of the arts as well. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1906 for his groundbreaking work on the structure of the nervous system and is considered to be the founder of modern neuroscience. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) was the Spanish physician and scientist who discovered the individual nature of the nerve cell (later termed the neuron).
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