Santiago saw things differently Santiago Ramón y Cajal, artist, doctor, father of neuroscience

As a child, Santiago expressed himself through art, using charcoal and chalk to draw pictures on doors and walls in his Spanish village. His father, a doctor, expected Santiago to set his artistic ambitions aside and study medicine. But as the narrative emphasizes, "Santiago saw things differently." While following the educational path demanded by his father, he found ways of making it his own. He saw beauty inside the human body and became an anatomy professor in 1883. Looking through a microscope, he drew pictures showing that neurons (previously considered a tangled web) are individual cells with treelike forms and observable stages of growth. His drawings and conclusions provided the basis of neuroscience. Iverson credits the man's early artistic inclination for his accomplishments as a scientist whose observations led to logical conclusions. Reproductions of Ramón y Cajal's drawings appear on relevant pages of the book, alongside Lozano's handsome digital illustrations, which feature expressive line drawings brightened with solid colors and occasional patterns. A picture book showing the value of the A in the STEAM field.

Born in Spain, Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852--1934) was the son of a doctor who wanted him to be one, too. But the boy, an artist at heart, was regularly locked into rooms for drawing in his schoolbooks. When he and his father slipped into a graveyard at night to study bones, he discovered one place where art intersects with medicine: "He saw the human body as a work of art." Obtaining a microscope, he began to draw nerve fibers in the brain, his drafting ability allowing him to follow intricate networks of what looked like "trunks, branches, and leaves." But they never grow together, he realized; instead, they transmit messages across the gaps between them. For his work demystifying the nervous system, he won the Nobel Prize. Iverson writes with delicacy, evoking childhood moments that were formative for Santiago: "The room was lit by a wisp of light... just enough light for drawing." Illustrations in an antiqued palette of coppers and grays by Lozano (Mayhem at the Museum) have a stylized cartoon quality, portraying the young protagonist as doll-like with an upturned nose. Several of Cajal's original drawings are included; back matter concludes. Ages 5--9. (Nov.)

An introduction to Santiago Ramón y Cajal, an artist and medical researcher who made a crucial discovery about how our nervous systems work. Iverson drafts a portrait of a visionary Spanish scientist who, compulsively drawing and painting from childhood on but compelled by his father to study medicine, was therefore well equipped to see patterns in networks of neurons and axons that others could not. He described and depicted them well enough to change scientific thinking on the way to earning a Nobel Prize in 1906. Lozano incorporates numerous examples of his subject's actual artwork into scenes of a determined-looking lad in short pants finding ways to make art (with pen, brush, and, later, a camera) in the face of opposition from both his father and his teachers. Later, as an adult, he translated images seen through a microscope into complex but lucid arrangements of cells and connections. Along with more information about nerve cells' structures and functions, the author offers readers further details about the life and accomplishments of, as she dubs him, the "Father of Neuroscience," in an afterword--including an amusing anecdote about how his co-Nobelist, Camillo Golgi, spent most of his acceptance speech at the ceremony arguing that his colleague's theories were wrong. Some nerve! Brightly illuminates a brilliant and multitalented yet unjustly obscure scientist. (bibliography, photographs) (Picture-book biography. 9-12) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.