Nobel Prize Recipient. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish neuroscientist, received the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded jointly with Camillo Golgi. According to the Nobel Prize committee, the covet award was given "in recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous system." Golgi and Cajal shared the same passion for science and dedication to research, but their personalities were very different to the point that their Nobel lecture contraindicated each other on some points. Knowing the shortcomings of Spain, his philosophy of life was each person has a duty to the “national debt,” sounding similar to United States President John Kennedy's famous statement, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” Born the son of a village surgeon, who became a Professor of Applied Anatomy in the University of Saragossa, his father persuaded him to study medicine over art school. In the early years of his education, he was a poor student with behavior problems, but proved that he had a talent of drawing. He attended medical school at the University of Saragossa, graduating in 1873. Serving as a medical officer in the Spanish Army, he was deployed to Cuba during the Ten-Year War while Cuba fought for independence from Spain. While in Cuba, he contracted malaria and tuberculosis. Upon returning to Spain, he became an assistant in the School of Anatomy in the Faculty of Medicine at Saragossa in 1875; at his own request, became Director of the Saragossa Museum in 1879; and earned his doctorate degree in medicine in Madrid in 1877. The same year, using the money from his service in Cuba, he purchased an used microscope and started his research, with his first studies were devoted to inflammation and to the structure of muscle fibers. He was appointed Professor of Descriptive and General Anatomy at Valencia in 1883, a Professor of Histology and Pathological Anatomy at Barcelona in 1887, and the Chairman of the Histology and Pathological Anatomy in Madrid in 1892. In 1887 a colleague returned from Paris, France, showing the new, breakthrough method of viewing the nerve cell, Golgi staining. In October of 1889, he attended the Congress of the German Anatomical Society in Berlin, showing his slides to the most worthy authorities in the world and received recognition for his “neuron doctrine” from several professors. His major published work was “Texture of the Nervous System of Man and Vertebrates,” which was translated in French and English. In 1901 he was appointed Director of the National Institute of Hygiene and in 1922 the Director of the Laboratory of Biological Investigations, which was later renamed the Cajal Institute. Among the many textbooks he published, these books are the most important: “Rules and Advice on Scientific Investigation,” which went into six editions and translated in German in 1933; “Manual of Normal Histology and Micrographic Technique” in 1889; “Elements of Histology” in 1897; and the “Manual of General Pathological Anatomy” in 1890. He published in various French and Spanish medical periodicals more than 100 articles on the fine structure of the nervous system and especially of the brain and spinal cord, but including also that of muscles and other tissues, and various subjects in the field of general pathology. Many of his writings had detailed anatomical drawings done by him. In 2014 the National Institutes of Health exhibited his original drawings in the Neuroscience Research Center. His study of the brain was translated into the German language in 1900. An exhibition, “The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal,” toured a host of art museums in the United States beginning in 2017 and ending 2019. Along with his anatomical drawings, he produced several portraits including a self-portrait. Besides the Nobel Prize, he awarded in 1905 from the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin the Helmholtz Medal. He was a member of every Spanish medical society and many in Europe, Great Britain, South America, and the United States, and he received monetary awards from several countries. He married an uneducated woman and the couple had four daughters and three sons, two died early in their lives.