The retina as a window into the brain

In 1885, Santiago Ramón y Cajal took a photographic self-portrait in his laboratory in Valencia, Spain, that shows his threadbare smock, sabots, simple microscope, and innumerable stains (appendix). With little money, little guidance, and not much knowledge of the scientific literature, he stated at that time that he was “forming the reckless desire to devote [himself]to the religion of the laboratory”,¹ as he had been transformed from a restless rebel in his schooldays into a focused observer. He described how, in his youth, watching a frog cut open to display its mesentery, he was “enraptured and tremendously moved on seeing the red and white blood cells move about like pebbles caught up in the force of a torrent”. With great artistry and accuracy, he drew mostly from memory and was renowned for his extraordinary concentration and visual recall. He followed the contemporary credo: “what has not been drawn has not been seen”.²

His 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Camillo Golgi, was the first awarded in the field of histology. The retina was “the oldest and most persistent of my laboratory loves”,¹ he once said. We therefore believe that he would have celebrated being the inspiration for the Cajal Embroidery Project³ (with its complexity, dimensionality, and linear interweaving) and, in particular, for Carol Wollaston’s embroidery on the cover of the November issue of The Lancet Neurology. Every thread brilliantly evokes Ramón y Cajal’s original work, even his idiosyncratic lettering.

Cajal shared the doubts he had felt as a young investigator with his own students. “If I triumph, who will applaud? And if I am uncertain, who will correct me and provide the encouragement to go on?”¹ At the University of Oxford, where we are based, several generations of students have now learnt about the clinical relevance of the visual pathway, from retinal ganglion cells to the lateral geniculate nucleus. We are sure Cajal would have celebrated the dissemination of this knowledge, with a degree of certainty and encouragement.