The Aula de Cajal is the classroom where Santiago Ramon y Cajal gave his lessons of histology and anatomical pathology from 1892 to 1922. As can be read in a marble memorial tablet, the room was carefully restored in 1972 by the Ilustre Colegio Oficial de Médicos de Madrid, the medical association that now occupies these premises of the old medical school of San Carlos in Madrid.
Cajal usually gave his lessons not from the stage but from the spot where his bronze bust stands now (as can be easily appreciate by the big photograph on the front wall), while his students had to answer his questions or to present their research from the wooden podium at the right end of the classroom.
Many books, drawings and memories of Cajal are on display in this highly evocative room. Among them a copy of his Nobel parchment, his death mask and a letter he wrote on the 15th of October, 1934, just two days before his death, to his disciple Rafael Lorente de Nó who was working in the United States.
Copy of Cajal’s Nobel parchment
Cajal’s death mask
Cajal’s letter to Rafael Lorente de No
- Photos by Luca Borghi @ (August 2013), courtesy of the Ilustre Colegio Oficial de Médicos de Madrid
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