Camillo Golgi

Agostino Bassi was the first to translate aetiological ideas on the microbiological genesis of diseases into an actual research programme. Dedicated to his own, private nat- uralistic researches, Bassi demonstrated experimentally that a type of silkworm disease was due to a ‘parasitic fungus.’ He successfully isolated the parasite and used it to infect a healthy animal. He was also responsible for intuitions on the concepts of immunity, healthy carriers, predisposal to contracting infections and the dynamics of epidemics.
He understood that all infections are a product of parasitic beings that invade other living organic beings. This led to the microbiological theory of infectious dis- eases that would make enormous developments with the German, Robert Koch, and Frenchman, Louis Pasteur.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal created histological images using a variety of artistic techniques and methods. In order to contextualise his practice, I have selected a set of drawings and prints of cartilage cells that were used in Cajal's reference handbooks. I then introduce a lithograph representing an inflamed cartilage included in Cajal's first publication. This technique enabled the publishing of graphic information in colour. By reviewing images included in the material that Cajal consulted during his pre-graduate years, I show that he participated in the transnational production of drawing and made use of the printing techniques available to present his research. By analysing a set of original drawings included in Cajal´s notebook, Diario de Observaciones, and his first published lithographs of cartilage cells and neurons, I reveal the graphic specificities of his transition from handmade drawings to print representations. Cajal´s drawing and lithographing relate directly to artistic interests developed in his youth (López Piñero, 1985), and these skills facilitated the technical transit between notebook and published images, enabling him to formalise his knowledge by including histological results in printed material. A determining factor in Cajal's graphic production relating to the nervous system was his expertise in using chemical silver nitrate, resulting from his interest in photography. Finally, his colour selection is discussed, in order to demonstrate that, even when Cajal drew black lines, he was using black as a specific colour, one he observed through the microscope after staining histological samples.

 Camillo Golgi (1843–1926) was born at Corteno, near Brescia, in northern Italy. After graduating in Medicine at the ancient University of Pavia, the former seat of great scientists and naturalists, Golgi continued a long-standing Italian tradition by studying the histology of the nervous system. While working as a modest physician at Abbiategrasso, a small town near Pavia, he developed a silver–osmium technique, the ”reazione nera” (black reaction), for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906. In the late 1890’s, 25 years after the publication of his black reaction and while Professor of General Pathology in Pavia, Golgi noticed a fine internal network in only partially silver-osmium-blackened Purkinje cells. Following confirmation by his assistant Emilio Veratti, Golgi published the discovery, called the ”apparato reticolare interno”, in the Bollettino della Società medico-chirurgica di Pavia in 1898, which is now considered the birthday of the ”Golgi apparatus”. The discovery of the Golgi apparatus can be added to the long list of accidental discoveries. The man after whom it is named was not a cytologist engaged in studying the inner structure of the cell, but a pathologist searching to prove a neuroanatomical theory.

We celebrate in 1998 the centenary of the discovery of the Golgi apparatus. Neurones have played a special role in the history of this cell organelle, primarily because the endocellular apparatus was discovered in nerve cells by Camillo Golgi when he was studying the cerebellum of an owl. In the following years, the apparatus of the nerve cell represented the prototype of this cell component which, however, was soon also detected in many other cell types. During the 1920s and 1930s the original idea of a Golgi endocellular “network” was refused and research was focused on the constituents and function of the organelle, using various tissues and techniques. However, the real existence of the apparatus was seriously questioned until the organelle was finally identified by electron microscopy in the mid-1950s. The studies performed on nerve cells during these decades is briefly reviewed here.