2010-10-15 17:14:47
In this chapter of Ciencia y Genios we offer you some snippets of the life of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. His achievements were extraordinary, his scientific publications are, even today, among the most cited today, however, beyond his research, Don Santiago stands out for his human value, aware of the importance of his work but unable to value them in the correct measure. At the end of the second volume of his autobiography, he wrote:
“I take it for granted and even convenient that in the flow of time my insignificant personality will be forgotten; with it, many of my ideas will undoubtedly be shipwrecked. Nothing can be subtracted from this inexorable law of life. Against all the allegations of self-love, the facts initially linked to a man will end up being anonymous, being lost forever in the ocean of universal science.
Little could the author have suspected that, more than a hundred years later, his name would be engraved in countless institutions, universities, hospitals, streets and squares in the most remote towns and cities throughout the world.
Cajal not only stood out for his great and recognized contributions to science, he was also a good draftsman and a skillful writer. His pictorial skills have been reflected in a multitude of drawings that represent what his well-trained eyes saw under the light of the microscope. From his writing skills we are left with works elaborated with no other desire than to enjoy talking about things other than his scientific work.
A sample of his skills as a writer is in the short work entitled “The corrected pessimist” written in 1905, a year before the Nobel was awarded. The play begins like this:
HE PESSIMISTIC CORRECTED.
By Santiago Ramon y Cajal
“Juan Fernández, the protagonist of this story, was a young doctor, twenty-eight years old, serious, studious, not without talent, but very pessimistic and with borders of a misanthrope. Orphaned and without relatives, he lived concentrated and reclusive in the company of a former housekeeper from his family.
Around the time we focused on him, our hero’s disgust with life and detachment from society had intensified. He neglected the clientele and the treatment of friends, who saw him as figs, and spent his time engrossed in reading works whose melancholic tonality matched well with the sentimental timbre of his spirit. It pleases the unfortunate to know that he did not cause misfortune and that his diminished concept of the world and of life also found asylum in strong and cultivated heads. It is well understood why Juan enjoyed and entertained himself by reading Schopenhauer and Hartmann, the unsympathetic and insane Nieztsche, and the grim and profound Gracián. And the pride of agreeing with the opinion of such qualified men brought him, in gusts, some consolation, in whose fugitive heat he felt the glacial lake of his will partially thaw and the painful laxity of his spirit and body ease somewhat.
For the unfortunate Fernández, life was a boring and graceless joke, given by Nature without knowing why or for what; the understanding was a rudimentary calculating machine, which errs in all arduous operations; our knowledge, an old book, full of erasures and gaps, and whose errata has more pages than the text; the senses, rudimentary and childish physical apparatus, without scope or precision, good only to hide from us the infinite palpitations of matter and the innumerable enemies of life; the heart, a fragile and undisciplined pump that shakes untimely and painfully in difficult moments, clouding the intelligence and paralyzing our hands, and, finally, the will, something like an aerial kite, fluctuating and at the mercy of a slight gust of wind and that he commits the foolishness of taking his mobility for freedom…”
Download here the full text in pdf format
REFERENCES.
Biography of Cajal, year by year
Cajal Institute
Famous quotes by Santiago Ramón y Cajal
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