Ivan Petrovich Pavlov Biography

(born Sept. 14 [Sept. 26, New Style], 1849, Ryazan, Russia—died Feb. 27, 1936, Leningrad [now St. Petersburg]) Russian physiologist known chiefly for his development of the concept of the conditioned reflex. In a now-classic experiment, he trained a hungry dog to salivate at the sound of a bell, which was previously associated with the sight of food. He developed a similar conceptual approach, emphasizing the importance of conditioning, in his pioneering studies relating human behaviour to the nervous system. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1904 for his work on digestive secretions.

Life

Pavlov, the first son of a priest and the grandson of a sexton, spent his youth in Ryazan in central Russia. There, he attended a church school and theological seminary, where his seminary teachers impressed him by their devotion to imparting knowledge. In 1870 he abandoned his theological studies to enter the University of St. Petersburg, where he studied chemistry and physiology. After receiving the M.D. at the Imperial Medical Academy in St. Petersburg (graduating in 1879 and completing his dissertation in 1883), he studied during 1884–86 in Germany under the direction of the cardiovascular physiologist Carl Ludwig (in Leipzig) and the gastrointestinal physiologist Rudolf Heidenhain (in Breslau).

Having worked with Ludwig, Pavlov's first independent research was on the physiology of the circulatory system. From 1888 to 1890, in the laboratory of Botkin in St. Petersburg, he investigated cardiac physiology and the regulation of blood pressure.

He became so skillful a surgeon that he was able to introduce a catheter into the femoral artery of a dog almost painlessly without anesthesia and to record the influence on blood pressure of various pharmacological and emotional stimuli. By careful dissection of the fine cardiac nerves he was able to demonstrate the control of the strength of the heartbeat by nerves leaving the cardiac plexus; by stimulating the severed ends of the cervical nerves, he showed the effects of the right and left vagal nerves on the heart.