SOURCE: "The Dark Room," in Grand Street, Vol. 12, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 223-40.

In the following essay, Montgomery explores the impact of Ramón y Cajal's scientific research on the study of vision.

1. Ayerbe, Spain—1860

Unlike the other boys at school, Santiago Ramón y Cajal had no fear of solitary confinement. The dark detention center, a basement room set below the town square, into which light slashed only through cracks in the room's single shuttered window, was a place for Cajal to think: a quiet room in which to concentrate on what outrages to commit tomorrow. Cajal was then eight or nine. His fellow delinquents, locked in the blackness of the school prison, felt the presence of evil spirits. But Cajal had been raised a rationalist by his physician father, Don Justo. When one day he saw a spectral image hanging on the ceiling of his cell, the...