The Butterflies of the Soul

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.