Camillo Golgi

Camillo Golgi was an Italian physician and pathologist who in 1873 devised the black reaction, a silver nitrate staining method that for the first time rendered whole nerve cells, body, dendrites and axon together, visible under the microscope. He held the chair of general pathology and histology at the University of Pavia and in 1898 described a cell structure later named the Golgi apparatus in his honor. He shared the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Santiago Ramon y Cajal for their work on the structure of the nervous system, although the two men held directly opposed theories of that structure: Golgi maintained the reticular theory, that nerve fibers fuse into a single continuous network, and used his own Nobel lecture to restate that view against the rival neuron doctrine his own staining method had done so much to make visible.