Dr. José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado (b. 1915) was a Spanish professor of physiology at Yale University, famed for his research into electrical stimulation of regions in the brain.
Delgado was born in Ronda, Spain in 1915. He received an Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Madrid just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, in which he served as a medical corpsman on the Republican side. After the war he had to repeat his M.D. degree, and then took a Ph.D. at the Cajal Institute in Madrid.
In 1946 he began a fellowship at Yale, and was invited by the noted physiologist John Fulton to join the department of physiology in 1950.
Delgado's research interests centered on the use of electrical signals to evoke responses in the brain. His earliest work was with cats, but later did experiments with monkeys and humans.
Much of Delgado's work was with an invention he called a stimoceiver, a radio which joined a stimulator of brain waves with a receiver which monitored E.E.G. waves and sent them back on separate radio channels. This allowed the subject of the experiment full freedom of movement while allowing the experimenter to control the experiment.
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