Short but intense. This was the unknown military career of Don Santiago Ramón y Cajal, at that time a young man who had recently graduated who served between 1873 and 1875 as a military doctor in the Spanish Army. Although brief, the future Nobel had time to suffer the sovereign boredom of the fruitless raids to hunt Carlists in Lleida, the corruption of the high command or the rigors of the tropical climate in Cuba, where malaria almost took him away. “Two tremendous years,” in the words of retired medical colonel Luis Alcarazo, reflected in two exhibitions held some time ago in Zaragoza about this distinguished scientist.

As specialists point out, wearing a uniform was not something that entered their plans. But in the summer of 1973, when he was only 21 years old and had just finished his degree in Medicine at the University of Zaragoza, the promising student was called up by the so-called Quinta de Castelar (by Emilio Castelar, president of the Executive of the First Republic).

He spent the first months in the Aragonese capital until examinations were called in Madrid for the Military Health Corps, which he passed with flying colors. Already with the rank of lieutenant, he joined the Burgos regiment, which had the mission of defending the Llanos de Urgel (Lleida) from Carlist attacks. However, in his continuous marches and countermarchs they did not encounter a single enemy party, which caused deep boredom in him. “That seemed like a game of blind man’s chicken (…) In eight months I did not have the opportunity to hear the whistle of bullets or to treat a wounded person (…) I can’t say anything interesting about what happened during my stay in Catalonia,” he recorded in his memoirs. .

When in 1874 he was assigned to Cuba with the rank of captain – moving overseas entailed immediate promotion – he saw the opportunity to quench his thirst for adventure. He ignored his father, Don Justo, who warned him about the unhealthiness of the island and encouraged him to ask for leave, and he also did not use the letters of recommendation that she had given him to avoid the most complicated positions.

After a three-week boat trip, he arrived on the island, already at war against the colonial forces, and met his first destination, the Vista Hermosa camp, where he was in charge of an infirmary with 200 beds. Here he fell ill for the first time with malaria, a disease endemic in that “enchanting paradise simply uninhabitable for the European,” as he described it. He also had to take up the rifle when, faced with an incursion by the mambises (Cuban guerrillas), he refused to take shelter in the fort and set out to defend the sanatorium along with the rest of the sick.

Convalescing in Port-au-Prince (now Camagüey), he came face to face with the corruption prevailing in the armed forces when he insistently demanded the pay he was owed and it did not arrive. “He must have touched some sensitive button because, without having recovered, they sent him to the San Isidro infirmary, where the situation was especially bad,” says Alcarazo.

In charge of some 300 beds, malaria soon took its toll on his health again. His renewed confrontations with the commanders over the prevailing corruption did not help either – “in San Isidro a good part of the employees defrauded the State, from the head of the garrison to the trainees and cooks,” he wrote – an animosity that almost made him come to blows with a commander over two horses that he wanted to keep in his infirmary.

Not without obstacles, in the end he was diagnosed with severe malarial cachexia, incompatible with any service, and he graduated in May 1875. After asking his father for money for the passage, he began his return and arrived at the port of Santander days later. “They found me yellow, emaciated, with a painful appearance that was sad,” he described of the reunion with his family.

Now recovered, with the 140 duros of silver that he managed to recover from the total owed, Ramón y Cajal bought a microscope and several other instruments with which he set up a home laboratory in his parents’ attic in Zaragoza. With no intention of taking up arms again, he focused again on doctoral studies and relaunched his career as a researcher and academic, which would ultimately bring him the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his contributions to neuroscience. “His time in Cuba was disastrous, but it was a vital experience that partly forged his character,” Alcarazo summarizes about those intense two years.