The importance of visual language in scientific research must be noted. To do this, it is necessary to go back to Leonardo da Vinci with his famous work: The vitruvian man; a drawing where the study of the ideal proportions of the human being is scientifically manifested in its anatomical dimension.
Following this tradition, the scientific community has been developing a skill in drawing that would be transcendental in the advances of medicine. Without going any further, at the end of the 19th century, Ramón y Cajal postulated the neuronal theory, discovering that the nervous system is made up of cells provided with various extensions. With his neuronal discovery, Ramón y Cajal overturned the “reticular theory”, the dominant theory until then, which proposed a nervous system structured as a continuous network of fibers.
To explain his theory, Ramón y Cajal published a scientific article titled Structures of the nervous centers of birds, where he pointed out that the nervous system is made up of cells that come into contact with each other through stimuli or nervous impulses. The article was accompanied by two illustrations; two histological drawings from his own hand showing microscopic sections of the cerebellum of a chicken and a pigeon.
As José M. Ramírez points out in his essay Dialogue and assessment (acvf), the aforementioned drawings fulfilled a transcendental role, since, in an international community of scientists of different nationalities, “the drawings spoke a common language.” If we look at the histological drawings of Ramón y Cajal, the first thing that comes to mind is that they are works of avant-garde painting, achieved with drops of ink and random strokes that intertwine forming a tangle similar to a network. However, if someone tells us the scientific function of such drawings, the appearance tends to dissipate.
It is possible to imagine Ramón y Cajal, in the mid-twenties, arriving at the Student Residence to talk regarding his discoveries, illustrating his conference with those avant-garde-looking drawings where neurons resemble spiders with thin and elongated legs, arthropods. insect hunters who would soon become part of the imagination of Dalí, Lorca and Buñuel, and who would have a deep impact in those times when the surrealist movement represented the hegemony of the interwar period.
José M. Ramírez’s essay takes us on a walk through these labyrinths; a gallery of mirrors where the image and the word complement each other in their scientific dimension. Because it is with words that we reach images. Without going any further, the image of Time was completed by Heraclitus with the help of words, presenting the different waters of the same river. Following his flow, José M. Ramírez, who has a doctorate in language sciences, presents us with the coincidences between the scientific method and the artistic world. We receive such synchronies through our optical channel. The histological drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal are a clear example.
José M. Ramírez explains it led by Deleuze, when he says that we capture the image to convert it into a percept, since our vision is favored by the intellectual power of words. The conclusion we draw following reading this curious essay is that language is the first form of knowledge and that vision was favored by it. Without such influence, the scientific method would not exist.
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