drawings II

DE CASTRO ON SENSORY AND SYMPATHETIC GANGLIA

Fernando de Castro obtained his Ph.D. degree (1922) at the University of Madrid (Spain), under the supervision of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, his mentor and Maestro for neuroscientists world-wide. Following a direct commanded by Cajal, Fernando de Castro unraveled the fine structure of sensory and vegetative ganglia from a series of species both in normal and pathological conditions. These neurological structures remained largely unknown, although many histologists attacked this study for decades and among them, significantly, Cajal and Russian contemporary Alexander S. Dogiel (1852-1922). It should be highlighted that the research from Fernando de Castro and from a disciple of Dogiel, Alexander Lawrentjew, opened the field of histology of the sensory and sympathetic ganglia for common knowledge. This work (published as five scientific papers in 1921, 1922, 1923 and 1924) evidenced the maturity of Fernando de Castro as a researcher and as an histologist, as was recognised by El Maestro Cajal, as well as by the eminent neuropathologist Wilder Penfield, founder of the Montreal Neurological Institute (Canada) who entrusted De Castro with the corresponding sections on his very famous treaty Penfield´s Cytology and Cellular Pathology of the Nervous System, published in 1932. De Castro never abandoned this field, publishing relevant works on the formation of synapses within ganglia, as well as on the degeneration and regeneration of sympathetic axons (1933, 1934, 1937, 1945 and 1951).

In this section, we show original drawings from Fernando de Castro on:

           -figure II.1 morphology of a typical ganglion cell

           -figure II.2 cell morphologies within a typical sympathetic ganglia

           -figure II.3 ganglion cells (from De Castro´s Ph.D. thesis)

           -figure II.4 ganglion cells (from De Castro´s Ph.D. thesis)

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