Camillo GolgiArticle Free Pass Camillo Golgi, (born July 7,
1843/44, Corteno, Italy—died Jan. 21, 1926, Pavia), Italian
physician and cytologist whose investigations into the fine
structure of the nervous system earned him (with the Spanish
histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal) the 1906 Nobel Prize for
Physiology or Medicine. As a physician at a home for incurables
in Abbiategrasso, Italy (1872–75), and with only rudimentary
facilities at his disposal, Golgi devised (1873) the silver
nitrate method of staining nerve tissue, an invaluable tool in
subsequent nerve studies. This stain enabled him to demonstrate
the existence of a kind of nerve cell (which came to be known as
the Golgi cell) possessing many short, branching extensions
(dendrites) and serving to connect several other nerve cells.
The discovery of Golgi cells led the German anatomist Wilhelm
von Waldeyer-Hartz to postulate, and Ramón y Cajal to establish,
that the nerve cell is the basic structural unit of the nervous
system, a critical point in the