Ramón y Cajal: a century after the publication of his masterpiece

Santiago Ramón y Cajal published the first of the three volumes of his principal life's work in 1899, and published the last volume in 1904. This book remains the definitive work on the morphology of the vertebrate nervous system. In it, Ramón y Cajal describes the structure and organization of virtually all parts of the nervous system and discusses his theories, including the neuron doctrine and the law of functional polarization, which are the cornerstones of modern neurobiology. A century later, Ramón y Cajal's work is still fundamental to understanding the nervous system.