Avenida de Ramón y Cajal

Santiago Ramón y Cajal held that the brain was not a continuous tangle of threads but a set of independent cells that touch without merging. That idea, the neuron doctrine, earned him the 1906 Nobel Prize in Medicine, shared with the Italian Camillo Golgi, whose staining method Cajal had refined until he drew a new sharpness out of the gray matter. Born in Petilla de Aragón in 1852, he came to Madrid in 1892 to take the chair of Histology at the Universidad Central. He drew by hand everything he saw under the microscope: branching nerve cells so precise they are still studied in medical schools. The Avenida de Ramón y Cajal crosses a stretch of Chamartín dotted with residential estates from the 1920s and 1930s, when Madrid housed its middle classes in English-inspired little garden houses.