the son of an #anatomy teacher, he was a precocious & rebellious child, imprisoned at 11 for destroying his neighbor’s yard gate with a homemade cannon. He loved art, but his father apprenticed him to a shoemaker & barber in an attempt to teach him some discipline. During the summer of 1868, his father tried to interest him in medicine by touring graveyards & getting him to sketch bones. This was successful & he graduated med school of the U of Zaragoza in 1873. He served as a 🧵2/

medical officer in the Spanish Army & went on expedition to Cuba in 1874–75. Returning to Spain, he pursued a doctorate in medicine in Madrid, graduating in 1877. ⁠
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2 years later he became director of the Zaragoza Museum, & married & eventually had 12 kids. He worked at the U of Zaragoza until 1883, when he was hired as an anatomy professor at the U of Valencia. He studied pathology of inflammation, the microbiology of cholera, & the structure of epithelial cells and tissues.⁠
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After moving to Barcelona, he learned Golgi’s method, which employed potassium dichromate & silver nitrate to randomly stain a few #neurons a dark black color, while the other cells remain transparent. He improved upon the method, & used it to investigate the central nervous system, which would otherwise be too densely intertwined for standard microscopic inspection. He made many extensive, detailed & beautiful illustrations of neural material for many species & 🧵4/5