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The work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal is difficult to understand without knowing the personalities of Justo, his father, and his brother Pedro. His father practically forced the two brothers to study medicine. Thanks to that, Santiago was able to combine his artistic talent with histology and wonderfully describe cerebral architecture. Pedro was a faithful brother and above all a friend of Santiago, and they worked together for years. Pedro was able to demonstrate the theories of his brother in nonmammalian amniotes, concluding that the basic elements of the nervous system are common to these animals and he provided images that served Santiago to formulate the theory of dynamic polarization. Pedro, who decided to remain in the shadow of his brother, was a very complete doctor, pathologist and gynecologist, who made interesting contributions in all these fields and above all was a great humanist who left an important personal and scientific legacy. Anat Rec, 2019. © 2019 The Authors. The Anatomical Record published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Association of Anatomists. Anat Rec, 303:1189-1202, 2020. © 2019 The Authors. The Anatomical Record published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Association of Anatomists., (© 2019 The Authors. The Anatomical Record published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Association of Anatomists.)

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the creation of the Instituto Cajal, we bring this thematic issue to honor Spanish neuroscience. The issue includes several papers written by scientists, most of them being direct descendants of those who lived on the front lines of the dawn of Spanish neuroscience. These pages reflect a summary of the main achievements of this unique group of neuroscientists, all of them belonging to the Cajal School. Finally, this school of scientists became the forerunner of the modern worldwide neuroscience. Anat Rec, 303:1179-1180, 2020. © 2020 American Association for Anatomy., (© 2020 American Association for Anatomy.)

Sherrington was a major proponent of the neuron doctrine and he was inspired by Santiago Ramón y Cajal's theory of dynamic polarization of nerve cells (Ley de la polarización dinámica de la célula nerviosa). Sherrington coined the term "synapse" to name the Cajal description of interneuronal contact and he gave the term, for functional nerve endings, as "Boutons terminaux," still used today. These two giants of neuroscience met only once, but they had a life-long friendship. It was Sherrington who wrote Cajal's Obituary for the Royal Society. We review here some of the scientific exchanges between Cajal and Sherrington, with particular attention to 1894, when the two neuroscientist met in London during Cajal's visit to deliver the Croonian Lecture to the Royal Society. We shall examine not only the scientific exchanges but also their friendship, which was immediate and strong. Anat Rec, 303:1181-1188, 2020. © 2019 American Association for Anatomy., (© 2019 American Association for Anatomy.)

Santiago Ramón y Cajal was a self-taught researcher. He almost always worked alone, usually in the solitude of his private laboratory installed at his home. He was also a university professor and therefore taught histology and pathology to many students. But because research laboratories were scarce and poorly equipped, he preferred to organize courses and tutor at home as well. For this reason, Cajal left a faint trace of disciples in the three academic chairs that he came to occupy. It may be argued that Cajal formed the histological school when the Spanish government decided to support his investigations and created a scientific laboratory for him, with funding to cover the cost of journals, instruments, materials, personnel, and so forth. This support occurred in the year 1902, after Cajal received the Moscow Prize. Some of his former students accompanied Cajal to the new laboratory. Upon receipt of new awards, including the Gold Medal of von Helmholtz (1905) and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1906), Cajal's popularity increased and a large number of students wanted to learn about the laboratory and work with the great Cajal. This review tells this history. But we realize that this is not an easy task because to be fair to all the people that formed the Spanish Histological School, we would need to write a book. This is not practical. Instead, selection of contributors to the formation of the Spanish Histological School is provided. At the same time, some brushstrokes of the story extend to and include the Cajal Institute, which ran in parallel with the Spanish Histological School., (© 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)