The Structure of the Central Nervous System

Abstract

Although the human central nervous system has been studied by medical doctors ever since the late Middle Ages, its detailed structure began to be unraveled only a century ago. In the second half of the nineteenth century two schools contended for scientific prevalence: the reticularists claimed that the nervous system formed a continuous, uninterrupted network of nerve fibres, whereas the neuronists asserted that this neural network is composed of a vast number of single, interconnected cellular units, the neurons. As often in the course of science, the struggle between these two doctrines was decided by the advent of a new technique, invented by Camillo Golgi around 1880, for the staining of nerve fibres by means of a bichromate silver reaction. This technique was ingeniously applied by the Spanish doctor Santiago Ramon y Cajal in 1888 to disprove the doctrine of reticularism by exhibiting the tiny gaps between individual neurons. The modern science of the human central nervous system thus has just celebrated its first centennial!¹