Neuron doctrine

The neuron doctrine is the concept that the nervous system is made up of discrete individual cells, a discovery due to decisive neuro-anatomical work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal and later presented by, among others, H. Waldeyer-Hartz. The term neuron (spelled neurone in British English) was itself coined by Waldeyer as a way of identifying the cells in question. The neuron doctrine, as it became known, served to position neurons as special cases under the broader cell theory evolved some decades earlier. He appropriated the concept not from his own research but from the disparate observation of the histological work of Albert von Kölliker, Camillo Golgi, Franz Nissl, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Auguste Forel and others.

Theodor Schwann proposed in 1839 that the tissues of all organisms are composed of cells. Schwann was expanding on the proposal of his good friend Matthias Jakob Schleiden the previous year that all plant tissues were composed of cells. The nervous system stood as an exception. Although nerve cells had been described in tissue by numerous investigators including Jan Purkinje, Gabriel Valentin, and Robert Remak, the relationship between the nerve cells and other features such as dendrites and axons was not clear. The connections between the large cell bodies and smaller features could not be observed, and it was possible that neurofibrils would stand as an exception to cell theory as non-cellular components of living tissue. Technical limitations of microscopy and tissue preparation were largely responsible. Chromatic aberration, spherical aberration and the dependence on natural light all played a role in limiting microscope performance in the early 19th century. Tissue was typically lightly mashed in water and pressed between a glass slide and cover slip. There was also a limited number of dyes and fixatives available prior to the middle of the 19th century.

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