Camillo Golgi: The Dawning of Neuroscience

Abstract

To establish the date of the birth of neuroscience is difficult and uncertain. In fact, the term “neuroscience” covers a vast range of biological sciences which today includes various disciplines: anatomy, physiology, neurochemistry, and genetics, as well as psychology and psychiatry. In a word, it includes everything which refers to the nervous system of living beings. Further, it is historically absurd to want to give the role of founder of neuroscience to just one person. Nevertheless, we may affirm that the work of Camillo Golgi amply contributed to the birth of neuroscience, and for this great merit he, together with Cajal, received the Nobel Prize.

“Even so nervous tissue did not became the subject of a special science until the late 1800s, when the first detailed descriptions of nerve cells were undertaken by Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramon y Cajal.”

Eric R. Kandel [3]

“But in my opinion he was never so grand, for his sharp intuition and his heroic persistence, as when, just 30 years old in a small city of the Milan hinterland, without any help and with rather rudimentary means, he came to discover the “black reaction,” by which he was the first to succeed in removing the heavy veil that covered our understanding on the structure of the central nervous system, and it was thereafter possible, as a result of his merit and that of numerous other experimenters, to make further key discoveries in all areas of histology.”

Luigi Berzolari, University of Pavia, In: Commemoration of Camillo Golgi, November 1926