Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 June 2014
Luis Simarro, Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Joaquín Sorolla were friends who cultivated art and science in an unhappy Spain. Simarro was the country's leading psychiatrist at the turn of the 20th century, Ramón y Cajal, or simply Cajal as he came to be known in the wider world won the Nobel Prize for his work on the nervous system, and Sorolla is remembered as ‘the Velázquez of light’. All three felt a deep love of Spain and strove to bring freedom, science and the light of truth to their countrymen, each in his own unique way.