CHAPTER 1“The Necessary Antecedent”


The Iberian Peninsula is practically an island: 90 percent is surrounded by water, with the only overland route to the rest of Europe, to the northeast, cut off by the “great spiked collar” of the Pyrenees. The mountains protect the inhabitants from the devil, an Aragonese saying goes, but keep out God’s love as well. If geography is destiny, then the fate of Spain is isolation.

The Aragonese highlands are a cloistered kingdom existing apart from time: “those hills, those soaring, rocky bluffs / those sunken glades, those harrowing ravines, wastelands and broad plateau” goes the epic The Song of Roland. Modern neuroscience is among the most sophisticated, high-technology endeavors in human history, and yet Cajal, its founding hero, was a “peasant genius,” to quote his fellow Nobel laureate Charles Sherrington.

The region where Cajal was born, stretching from the Ebro River to the Pyrenees, is known as Alto Aragon, or Upper Aragon, but the identification is more cultural than geographic. Ancient visitors commented on the people’s “characteristic of inhospitality” and the “higher degrees of superstition and tribalism in the northern outposts of Hispania than anywhere else.” So difficult was it to convert them to Christianity that, according to legend, they nearly drove Saint James to quit his divine mission.

The southern coast of Spain is sculpted to a pinch-point, where only nine miles separate Europe from North Africa. In the year 711, a small force of Berbers—from the Roman word for “barbarian”—crossed the strait in boats and conquered the peninsula within three years. Around the turn of the ninth century, the Frankish king Charlemagne established the territory south of the Pyrenees as a buffer zone, and the highlands became the sacred battleground of a war between Islam and Christianity. Those Moorish rulers who were flourishing in the south considered the frontier region too godless and lawless for anyone but the most devout warriors to survive in. A few highland counties formed a core of resistance, and in the eleventh century became the Kingdom of Aragon, which led the charge to expel the Moors. Finally, in the fifteenth century, Aragon merged with the Kingdom of Castile to form the nucleus of modern Spain. This account of Spanish history, known as the Reconquest, is essentially a romantic myth, a story of national identity conjured and popularized in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Cajal was coming of age.

The northern highlands, guarded by castles, forts, and towers, remained a contested territory, controlled by neither Muslims nor Christians, and it was there, in the year 864, that García de Benavides, nephew of the king of Pamplona, and Ibn Abdalá, son of the ruler of Zaragoza, fought a duel over a piece of territory. According to legend, both men broke their armor and chipped their daggers but continued swinging maces, bare-chested. Abdalá knocked García to the ground and was about to deliver the fatal blow, but García ripped a stone from the ground and smashed his enemy across the face, completely detaching his lower jaw, killing him instantly and scattering his teeth across the battlefield. In Aragonese—a distinct Romance language—the word caxal, or cajal, means “molar.”

As the Greek historian Strabo noted, the highlands were “an exceedingly wretched place to live in,” and Cajal’s family came from the central Pyrenean region, the most rugged terrain of all. Annual rainfall was so low that grass for livestock dried up, and so few trees grew that peasants were left to gather firewood from bushes and shrubs. In the summer, the sun beat down like a vengeful god; and in the winter, temperatures could plummet to twenty degrees below zero, so cold that some highlanders, afraid of freezing, never took off their clothing. Agricultural plots were no more than a few acres of thin, stone-cluttered soil.

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Cajal’s father, Justo Ramón y Casasús, would have been the hero of the family had he never had a son. He was born in 1822 into a family of indigent farmers in Larres, which, with over two hundred residents, counted among the most populous villages in the comarca, or district. In those days, school was not compulsory, and so at around seven years old—as was customary for highland children—Justo began to work, both as a farmhand and as a shepherd. The land was still ruled by the medieval law of inheritance, which dictated that, to keep plots intact, property was to be inherited by firstborn sons only.

Justo, the third son, grew up knowing that he would inherit nothing. He could either live under the guardianship of his eldest brother or leave his native village in search of a livelihood, but given the almost complete lack of social mobility in nineteenth-century Spain, his best option would have been to become a farmer, following in the footsteps of his own father, Esteban Ramón, also a younger son lacking an inheritance.

Justo was in love with Antonia Cajal, the only daughter of the town weaver, whose family lived practically next door. Though three years older than Justo, she was confirmed during the same ceremony as he was. In Alto Aragon—a traditionalist, conservative society—where marriage was both a mercantile and sacred contract, whole communities protested the births of bastard children and divorces with extravagant mocking parades. Courtship was a matter of pragmatism, and with neither money nor prospects, Justo could not have been seen as a desirable match.

When he was sixteen or seventeen years old, Justo decided to leave Larres for Javierrelatre, a village about twenty miles away, where he apprenticed himself to a barber-surgeon—a strange choice, given that barber-surgery was one of the lowliest professions in Spain. But Antonia’s mother came from the Casa Mancebo, the House of Nurses and Barbers, and Justo may have wanted to impress her family. He promised Antonia that he would marry her when he returned.

Surgical procedures were once the province of the clergy until a twelfth-century papal bull declared the shedding of blood unholy. Already present at monasteries, tonsuring monks’ hair, barbers were skillful enough with a razor to open veins. In the Middle Ages, the most common medical treatment was bloodletting, a means of restoring equilibrium among the body’s “four humors,” an imbalance of which was thought to cause disease. One Renaissance handbook claimed that bleeding “clears the mind, strengthens the memory, cleanses the guts, dries up the brain, warms the marrow, sharpens the hearing, curbs tears, promotes digestion, produces a musical voice, dispels sleeplessness, drives away anxiety, feeds the blood, rids it of poisonous matter and gives long life.” Ads posted outside shops depicted barber-surgeons with rolled-up sleeves and blood-soaked hands amputating limbs or bandaging heads.

For the first few years, Justo performed menial tasks, sweeping the shop floor and bringing water from the well to heat curling irons and wash shaving cloths. By watching his master, Albeita, Justo learned to wield the razor, extract teeth, administer enemas, splint fractures, and apply poultices, proving such a quick study that soon Albeita let him treat patients by himself.

Roughly 75 percent of Spaniards over the age of ten were illiterate, and in the highlands that number was closer to 90 percent. Justo either never attended school or left before he could learn to read. Albeita possessed an ample library, where, during his scant off-hours, Justo taught himself to read, probably by matching up the illustrations of barber-surgery practices with his direct experience in the shop. In the process, he discovered that he had been blessed with a miraculous gift: he was able to memorize entire textbooks.

The Spanish word for “bloodletter,” sangrador, was so demeaning that the Oxford English Dictionary notes that, though the term literally means “bleeder,” it also means “an ignorant pretender to medical knowledge.” To evade the stigma, sangradores lobbied the queen for a name change, and in 1836, right before Justo began his apprenticeship, she finally granted their request, reorganizing the medical hierarchy into three classes within the medical profession: first class (physicians), second class (surgeons), and third class (barber-surgeons). With Albeita, Justo had found not only a livelihood but also, perhaps, an inheritance, as he might one day take over his master’s shop or open his own. But Justo could not stand the thought of anyone looking down on him, and he believed that, with his extraordinary memory, he could elevate his status by earning an academic degree.

One day, when he was twenty-one years old, Justo shocked Albeita by announcing his departure. With his remaining salary and a small loan from his eldest brother, Justo set out for Zaragoza, walking seventy miles to the provincial capital, toting all his worldly belongings over his shoulder. “If you give an Aragonese man a nail to drive,” a saying goes, “he would rather use his head than a hammer.”

Justo settled in the working-class neighborhood of the Arrabal, where he apprenticed with another barber-surgeon while attending secondary school, eventually completing his degree. Without telling his master, he applied for a job at the provincial hospital as a practicante, a medical assistant, beating out twenty-five other candidates to finish first in the competitive examinations. Though the practicante represented the highest achievement for a barber-surgeon, Justo knew that he would remain subservient to the actual surgeons and physicians unless he earned a university degree. He enrolled at the University of Zaragoza for a second-class certificate in surgery, but in 1845 the medical program there was shut down. At that point, he could have returned home and married Antonia, as he had promised. But no desire was stronger in him than professional ambition.

Justo moved to Barcelona, a seven-day walk away, where he continued his training at the university medical school, which boasted the first modern medical program in Spain. The population of Barcelona—the capital of Catalonia and the first Spanish city to undergo industrialization—was two hundred thousand, a thousand times greater than that of his native village. Immigrants from the provinces crammed into foul-smelling slums and shacks made out of garbage. Homeless, Justo wandered the streets for days.

In the village of Sarría, just north of the city, Justo found a barber-surgeon who let him work as his assistant while attending classes, walking to and from the university, an hour each way. He adopted a strict regime of austerity, spending no money, wasting no energy or time, refusing to let anything distract him. On Sundays and holidays, he opened his own portable barber’s stall near the port, the most popular destination in Barcelona. As hundreds of ships bobbed in the Mediterranean, thousands of dockhands and sailors roamed the quay in need of a shave.


Copyright © 2022 by Benjamin Ehrlich