SOURCE: "Santiago Ramón y Cajal: The Atoms of Brain, 1889," in The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought, The University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 100-15.

In the following essay, Everdell discusses Ramón y Cajal's formulation of neuron theory, suggesting that he may be 'the most important progenitor of twentieth-century neuroscience'.

But when classicism says "man," it means reason and feeling. And when Romanticism says "man," it means passion and the senses. And when modernism says "man" it means the nerves.

—Hermann Bahr, The Overcoming of Naturalism: Sequel to "Critique of the Moderns"

In October 1889, at the Congress of the German Anatomical Society at the University of Berlin, a short, powerfully built Spaniard with penetrating black eyes set up a small exhibit of drawings done on paper with colored inks. For the past two and a half years, alone in a spare room behind his...