Ivan Pavlov

• 1. Introduction

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  Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born on the 26th of September 1849 in Ryazan, a city in the Russian Empire, the eldest of ten children born to a village Orthodox priest. The name Pavlov is today shorthand for an automatic, almost mechanical reaction to a cue. But the man behind that idea spent his early career studying something far more mundane: how a dog's stomach works.

  He would go on to win the Nobel Prize, write to Joseph Stalin protesting the persecution of intellectuals, and ask one of his students to sit beside his deathbed and record exactly what dying felt like. The questions this documentary will answer are how a seminarian's son became the first Russian Nobel laureate, why his most famous discovery happened almost by accident, and what kind of man could simultaneously accept Soviet honours and write letters of contempt to the Communist government.

• 2. From Seminary to Laboratory

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  Pavlov did not begin formal schooling until he was 11 years old. A fall from a high wall onto stone pavement left him seriously injured as a young child, and he spent those early years helping around the house, gardening, cycling, rowing, swimming, and playing gorodki. Despite that delayed start, he could already read by age seven.

  His father's world was the Russian Orthodox Church, and Pavlov enrolled in the Ryazan church school and then the local theological seminary. Two writers pulled him away from that path. Dmitry Pisarev, a literary critic of the 1860s, and Ivan Sechenov, whom Pavlov later called the father of Russian physiology, spread progressive scientific ideas that captured the young seminarian's imagination. Pavlov left without graduating and enrolled in 1870 in the physics and mathematics department at the University of Saint Petersburg.

  In his fourth year, a research project on the physiology of the nerves of the pancreas won him a prestigious university award. That early recognition pointed toward the direction his entire career would take. He completed the Candidate of Natural Sciences degree in 1875, then pressed on to the Imperial Academy of Medical Surgery, where he worked as assistant to his former teacher Elias von Cyon. When von Cyon was replaced by another instructor, Pavlov left too.

• 3. Building a Scientific Life

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  Pavlov spent two years investigating the circulatory system as a laboratory assistant to Konstantin Ustimovich at the physiological department of the Veterinary Institute. That work fed directly into his medical dissertation. In 1878, the clinician Professor Sergey Botkin invited him to lead the physiological laboratory at Botkin's clinic. Pavlov graduated from the Medical Military Academy in 1879 with a gold medal for his research, then won a fellowship for postgraduate study.

  The years at Botkin's clinic were productive. In 1883, Pavlov presented his doctoral thesis on the centrifugal nerves of the heart, outlining ideas about the trophic function of the nervous system. His collaboration with the clinic also produced evidence about how reflexes regulate the activity of circulatory organs.

  After completing that doctorate, Pavlov went to Germany to study with Carl Ludwig and Eimear Kelly in the Heidenhain laboratories in Breslau, remaining there from 1884 to 1886. Rudolf Heidenhain was already studying digestion in dogs using an exteriorized section of the stomach. Pavlov improved the technique by solving the problem of maintaining the external nerve supply intact. That refined preparation became known as the Heidenhain or Pavlov pouch, an early sign that Pavlov's name would attach itself to the methods he refined as much as the ideas he developed.

• 4. The Digestion Years

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  Returning to Russia in 1886, Pavlov found his path blocked. Saint Petersburg rejected his application for a chair of physiology. He turned down offers from Tomsk University in Siberia and the University of Warsaw. In 1890, he accepted a professorship in pharmacology at the Military Medical Academy, staying five years. Then in 1891, the Institute of Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg invited him to organize and direct its Department of Physiology. That appointment changed everything.

  Over the next 45 years, under his direction, the institute became one of the most significant centers of physiological research anywhere in the world. Pavlov also took up the chair of physiology at the Medical Military Academy in 1895 and held that post continuously for three decades.

  At the Institute of Experimental Medicine, Pavlov built a full-scale kennel for experimental dogs. His goal was to observe long-term physiological processes, which meant keeping the animals alive and healthy over extended periods. He called these chronic experiments, distinguishing them sharply from the acute experiments that preceded him, in which vivisection killed the animal before anything about normal function could be learned. His methods included surgically creating fistulas between digestive organs and an external pouch so he could directly examine the contents of those organs. After twelve years of this work, he published The Work of the Digestive Glands in 1897. Starting in 1901, Pavlov was nominated for the Nobel Prize four successive years. He did not win until 1904, because earlier nominations had been broad rather than tied to a specific discovery. The prize recognized his work on the physiology of digestion specifically.

• 5. The Accidental Discovery

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  Pavlov's most famous insight arrived while he was focused on digestion. He noticed that his dogs began to salivate not only when food appeared, but when the technician who normally fed them walked into the room. The anticipation itself triggered the physical response. From that observation, he began systematically manipulating the stimuli that preceded feeding, using buzzers, metronomes, whistles, tuning forks, electric shocks, and a range of visual cues to determine exactly what the animals were responding to.

  His assistant Ivan Tolochinov, who used the phrase "reflex at a distance" for what he observed, presented their joint findings at the Congress of Natural Sciences in Helsinki in 1903. Later that same year, Pavlov gave a fuller account at the 14th International Medical Congress in Madrid, presenting a paper titled The Experimental Psychology and Psychopathology of Animals.

  A 1994 review by A. Charles Catania cast doubt on whether Pavlov ever actually used a bell, despite the popular image. Roger K. Thomas of the University of Georgia later identified three references suggesting Pavlov did use a bell, and the debate remains unresolved. What is certain is that the range of stimuli Pavlov used was far wider than a single ringing bell.

  The concept Pavlov himself called the "conditional reflex" was developed jointly with Tolochinov in 1901. Edwin B. Twitmyer at the University of Pennsylvania published similar research in 1902, a year before Pavlov's own publication. Pavlov's work reached Western audiences mainly through the writings of John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, whose behaviorist framework made conditioning a central concept in psychology.

• 6. Nerves, Temperament, and Stress

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  Pavlov's research extended well beyond saliva and digestion. He was drawn to the ancient biomarker categories described by Hippocrates and Galen, the four temperament types that physicians had debated since antiquity. Pavlov renamed and updated them based on what he called properties of nervous systems: strength, mobility of nervous processes, and the balance between excitation and inhibition.

  He mapped these onto four types, which he renamed the strong and impetuous type, the strong equilibrated and quiet type, the strong equilibrated and lively type, and the weak type, corresponding to the choleric, phlegmatic, sanguine, and melancholic of classical medicine.

  Pavlov and his researchers also observed what they termed transmarginal inhibition, the body's response of shutting down when overwhelmed by stress or pain, including electric shock. All temperament types eventually reached this shutdown state, but they reached it at different points. Pavlov noted that the most fundamental inherited difference between individuals was how quickly they reached that threshold. In 2002, a survey in the Review of General Psychology ranked Pavlov as the 24th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, placing a physiologist who never fully accepted the label of psychologist firmly within psychology's canon.

• 7. Private Life and Public Defiance

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  Pavlov met Seraphima Vasilievna Karchevskaya in 1878 or 1879 when she came to St. Petersburg to study at the Pedagogical Institute. They married on the 1st of May 1881. She was born in 1855 and went by Sara. The first nine years of their marriage were financially difficult; the couple sometimes had to stay with other people and at times lived apart to find hospitality. Sara's first pregnancy ended in miscarriage. Their next child, a boy named Mirchik, died suddenly in childhood, leaving Sara deeply depressed. They eventually had four more children: Vladimir, Victor, Vsevolod, and Vera. Their youngest son Vsevolod died of pancreatic cancer in 1935, one year before his father.

  Pavlov was an atheist. When his follower E. M. Kreps asked him directly about his religious beliefs, Pavlov replied that it was sheer fantasy to call him religious, and attributed his atheism to his seminary years, saying that like most seminarians he became an unbeliever in school.

  Toward the Soviet government, Pavlov maintained a posture that is rare in any era: frank, documented hostility from someone who also accepted the regime's support. He accepted Soviet money and honours while openly expressing contempt for Communist policies. In 1923, he stated he would not sacrifice even the hind leg of a frog to the kind of social experiment the regime was conducting. In 1927, he wrote to Stalin protesting what was being done to Russian intellectuals and saying he was ashamed to be Russian. After the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934, he wrote several letters to Vyacheslav Molotov criticizing the mass persecutions that followed, and asked for reconsideration of cases involving people he knew personally. In the final months of his life, after reading a draft of the 1936 Stalin Constitution, he expressed guarded optimism about what he saw as a possible turn toward greater freedom.

• 8. Death and Legacy

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  Pavlov died on the 27th of February 1936 of double pneumonia at the age of 86. Conscious until his final moments, he asked a student to sit beside his bed and record the circumstances of his dying, wanting to document the subjective experience of that terminal phase as rigorously as he had documented anything in his laboratory. He was given a grand funeral. His study and laboratory were preserved as a museum, and he was buried in the Literatorskie mostki section of Volkovo Cemetery in St. Petersburg.

  The Pavlov Institute of Physiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, founded by Pavlov in 1925, was named after him following his death. The asteroid 1007 Pawlowia and the lunar crater Pavlov also carry his name. The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that whether Pavlov's methods could cover the whole of human behaviour was open to question, but that within their field they had shown how to apply scientific methods with quantitative exactitude.

  Pavlovian conditioning became a theme in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in 1932 and in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow in 1973. In educational practice, his early demonstrations of how stimuli preceding a behavior shape the behavior itself laid the groundwork for antecedent-based intervention strategies still used in classrooms and clinical settings. His Wednesday laboratory meetings, which he began in 1921 and continued until he died, were where he spoke frankly on psychology and many other subjects, a habit he kept up for fifteen years.