Ivan Petrovich Pavlov 1904 (24)

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov 1904 (24)

Ivan Pavlov of born Sept. 26, 1849, Ryazan, Russia. they Russian physiologist. He is known chiefly for the concept of the conditioned reflex. He did not complete his studies, but entered St Petersburg University in 1870, where he continued to study natural science, and decided to make his career as a physiologist. After graduation in 1875, he went to the Military Medical Academy to pursue his research. He completed his doctorate there in 1883, and then went to Germany (1884–6), where he studied in Leipzig with Carl Ludwig, and in Breslau. In 1890 he was appointed professor in the department of pharmacology in the Military Medical Academy.

In 1904 he received the Nobel Prize for his work on the physiology of digestion. From 1925 to 1936 he worked mainly in three laboratories: the Institute of Physiology of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (which is now named after him), the Institute of Experimental Medicine, and the biological laboratory at Koltushy (now Pavlov), near St Petersburg. Pavlov was a skillful ambidextrous surgeon; using dogs as experimental animals, he established fistulas from various parts of the digestive tract by which he obtained secretions of the salivary glands, pancreas, and liver without disturbing the nerve and blood supply.

His ability to reduce a complex situation to a simple experiment and his pioneering studies relating human behaviour to the nervous system laid the basis for the scientific analysis of behaviour. After the Russian Revolution, he became an outspoken opponent of the communist government. He won a 1904 Nobel Prize for his work on digestive secretions.

He reached a position in Science which was unique, almost legendary. In order to understand Pavlov he must be described both as a scientist and as a man. Pavlov, the eldest son of a poor priest, was born in Central Russia in the rather out-of-the-way district town of Ryazan. The life of the provincial clergy was at that time an extremely difficult one. In fact, it hardly differed from that of the peasants. The clergyman had to work his own land and had practically no other source of income beside the food which he could raise himself.

Pavlov’s career in physiology, defined by struggle and poverty until his fourth de- cade, was, beginning in his fifth, marked by illustrious achievements and ideas for new research programs. His Nobel Prize- winning research on the digestive glands gave way to an even more ambitious pro- gram that sought to explain the mysteries of the human psyche. In this later project, he posited that the conditional reflex characterized in his earlier work was the physiological correlate of psychological association.

However, he was never able to satisfyingly demonstrate his overarching theory of the origins and formation of habits and temperaments. Despite this, his research program engaged with and contributed to a range of topics across the fields of clinical neurology, neurosurgery, psycho- analysis, psychiatry, human genetics, and Gestalt psychology.

Pavlov as a student at Riazan’s seminary in the 1860s. As a seminarian, he took his only formal course in psychology and trained for the priesthood. But, influenced by Pisarev and other popular essayists of the time, he embraced the secular alternative of science. Pavlov’s “bell” in the late 1920s or 1930s, the device used to expose dogs to various carefully modulated auditory stimuli. As in earlier years, the iconic bell with clapper played no significant role in his research. Pavlov’s laboratory notebooks and pocket-sized calendars were suitable for jotting notes as he moved from lab to lab and coworker to coworker. Here he also occasionally wrote political and philosophical comments.

Pavlov was a behaviourist. This means that his theories focused on observable behaviour, because behaviour can be measured and thought cannot. Pavlov viewed individual differences in personality as the result of learning and different environmental experiences. Scientific evidence is the keyword in his theory. Pavlov studied reflexes, that is the automatic behaviours that are caused by a stimulus from the environment. Some reflexes, such as blinking our eyes when a puff of air comes in it, or the sucking of a baby when something is put in his/ her mouth. This automatic behaviour can be manipulated. This is called conditioning.

Pavlov was disturbed by the phenomenon. He considered this ‘psychic secretion’ a hindrance to his scientific work. Later on, however, he attempted to explain the unexpected turn of affairs. Initially he tried to go by the introspective method and tried to guess what the dog was ‘thinking’. Soon he abandoned this effort and emphasised on the association between the natural and neutral stimuli to interpret the findings.

Pavlov elevated skepticism in science to the status of virtue. Yet he could be dogmatic, petty, and unforgiving of those who dared entertain even minor differences of interpretation with him. He thought of himself as inclined to laziness but adopted the essayist Samuel Smiles’s moral doctrine of industriousness  as his mantra and life’s practice. Nine months of each year, he devoted himself obsessively to scientific work in St. Petersburg, and then for three summer months he enjoyed gardening, art, music, philosophy, and literature in his family’s summer residence, with science seemingly forgotten. Clearly devoted to his wife and children, Pavlov nevertheless pursued an adulterous relationship in his last three decades. He furthermore could be a tyrannical and indifferent father.

For Pavlov, science was not merely a set of principles and methodologies, a career, or even a calling. It was also a value system, worldview, and way of life fundamental to his sense of dostoinstvo and self. He devoted himself to its ideals with sincerity, passion, and astonishing energy. Conversely, as he fashioned himself around this science, practiced it successfully, and became one of its iconic figures, he came easily to identify it unselfconsciously with his own methods, achievements, status, values, and desires.

Pavlov the death of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov on 27 February, 1936, in his 86th year, there passed away one of the greatest physiologists of the last and the present century. Pavlov was possibly also the most popular and the best known man in the physiological world. The immense prestige which he had and the esteem in which he was held by his contem poraries can only partly be explained by his outstanding scientific achievements; to a large extent they were also due to his remarkably attractive and arresting personality. His im pulsive, straightforward, on the whole rather simple, joyous, and kind attitude to everybody around him evoked a feeling of warm affection and admiration in all who knew him.