Santiago Ramón y Cajal: Vacation Stories

It was in 1905, the year before he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with his archrival in neurohistology, Camillo Golgi, that Santiago Ramón y Cajal finally risked publishing these provocative tales. We learn from Laura Otis’s excellent introduction that he had actually written these “antireligious, anti-establishment” stories (p. vii) some twenty years earlier, and they are therefore grounded in the cutting-edge science of the mid-1880s—in bacteriology at the time of Koch, in microscopy, and in hypnosis. Nevertheless, there are many aspects that have a disturbingly perennial relevance, not least the deliberate use of bacterial contamination for revenge.