Who was Pavlov?
Introduction
So who was Ivan Pavlov? He was born in the provincial Russian town of Ryazan in 1849. Raised in a strict family environment, his father, an austere, authoritarian figure was the local Russian Orthodox priest, as was his father before him. Ivan was expected to follow suit. Instead, like many of his generation, he turned his back on a religious career, and instead made the decision to head to St Petersburg University to study the natural sciences.
Whilst he found much of the study of science and medicine tedious, he was excited by the subjects of anatomy and physiology (the branch of biology that aims to understand the mechanisms of living things), eventually taking up the latter the focus of his doctoral thesis while supporting himself through working as a ‘demonstrator’ – vivisecting animals for scientific experiments and classroom demonstrations.
In from the cold
After a prolonged period in the professional wilderness, a stroke of unexpected luck landed him a plum job in 1890, as Director of the Physiology Department at the city’s new Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine. He set about building a factory-like system, overhauling laboratory practice in line with new scientific and technological developments. He and a growing team of co-workers pursued the study of digestion in dogs, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1905.
With a growing family (and a secret affair with one of his most able co-workers Maria Petrova), a fancy St Petersburg apartment filled with expensive art, and a summer house in the fashionable Gulf of Finland, Pavlov was now an established member of the city’s bourgeoise and an internationally renowned figure.
The best of times, the worst of times
Pavlov’s turn to the study of ‘conditioned reflexes’ might have raised a few eyebrows initially in the early 1900s, but not for long. As result after result poured in from the Institute apparently confirming the conditioned reflex as a basis for understanding learning, behaviour and even the depths of the human psyche, his reputation was enhanced, and his work supported by the Tsarist regime.
Disastrous involvement in World War One, led by Tsar Nicholas II’s government, fuelled mass discontent long brewing in the Russian population.
Revolution followed in 1917, and then a prolonged civil war, Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ eventually gaining the decisive upper hand. St Petersburg’s population was decimated by these events, starvation, hypothermia, violence, disease and emigration combining to reduce it by around two-thirds (from approximately 2.5m in 1917 to 750,000 in 1920).
The Pavlov family lost a brother, a son, and many of their close friends during this period. He persisted in his experiments where he could, though co-workers and dogs were difficult to recruit, and often in desperately poor physical shape, human and canine alike.
By 1921 Lenin was set on rebuilding the country and now considered scientific and medical developments as key to that process. Perhaps aware of Pavlov’s value as propaganda, he decided to reboot his laboratory enterprise with significant resources, including the promise of as many dogs as he needed. He was lavishly supported until his death in 1936. A state funeral was held in his honour, 1000s lining the streets of St Peterburg for the procession.
Today Pavlov is mostly remembered for his conditioning experiments with dogs, and the apparent scientific discoveries that have meant he still looms large in the history of psychology and the development of scientific methods. We have inherited an image of him as a benign and diligent grandfather figure – in line with that of many Victorian-era ‘great men’ (they are nearly always men) of science. The story is much more interesting, entertaining, and controversial, than such an image suggests.
