Oddlet: Santiago Ramón y Cajal · 1 min read
Jun 25, 2026
The Butterflies of the Soul
He won the 1906 Nobel Prize for proving the brain is built from separate cells. He found out by drawing them, on an ink-stained tablecloth, for fifty years.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal won the 1906 Nobel Prize for proving the brain is built from billions of separate cells. He found this out by drawing them. By hand. In ink and pencil, alone in a back room of his house in Madrid, on an ink-stained tablecloth, with chairs piled in journals and slides still gummy from chemical treatments. He did this for fifty years. He produced more than 2,900 drawings.
He worked twenty-hour shifts at the microscope. Once he spent one of them watching a single white blood cell crawl out of a capillary, until it was out. The pyramidal cells of the cortex he called "the mysterious butterflies of the soul, the beating of whose wings may some day clarify the secret of mental life." This is what a man writes about grey smears on a slide when he has been awake too long and loves them too much.
After his daughter Enriqueta died of meningitis in 1891 he stopped sleeping, and began "intoxicating myself, during the late hours of the night, with the light of the microscope, in order to dull my cruel torments."
The drawings now hang in galleries as fine art.
He drew them so he could keep looking.
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- Wikipedia — Santiago Ramón y Cajal — Comprehensive biography: birth/death dates and places, childhood (cannon at age 11, barber/shoemaker apprenticeships), Zaragoza degree 1873, Cuba expedition 1874–75, Panticosa recovery, marriage to Silveria Fañanás García 1879, Golgi-stain modification, Nobel 1906 with Golgi, Cajal Institute, 1905 'Dr. Bacteria' science-fiction stories.
- NobelPrize.org — 'Life and discoveries of Santiago Ramón y Cajal' — Official Nobel essay: Zaragoza degree, Cuba service, Simarro introducing him to silver impregnation in Madrid, neuron doctrine vs reticular theory, Waldeyer naming it 1891, key publications including Textura and Recollections of My Life.
- Encyclopædia Britannica — Santiago Ramón y Cajal — Confirms 1 May 1852 Petilla de Aragón birth and 17 October 1934 Madrid death; chronology of professorships; improved Golgi silver-nitrate stain (1903) and developed gold stain (1913); Cajal Institute commissioned by King Alfonso XIII (1920).
- OUP Blog — 'Cajal's butterflies of the soul' (Javier DeFelipe) — Source for the 'butterflies of the soul' passage about pyramidal cells; situates the quote within Cajal's writings on cerebral cortex and his autobiography.
- The Marginalian — 'Beautiful Brain'
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