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Title details for Ivan Pavlov by Daniel P. Todes - Available

Ivan Pavlov

A Russian Life in Science

by Daniel P. Todes
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Winner of the Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society "Contrary to legend, Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) never trained a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell." So begins this definitive, deeply researched biography of Ivan Pavlov. Daniel P. Todes fundamentally reinterprets the Russian physiologist's famous research on conditional reflexes and weaves his life, values, and science into the tumultuous century of Russian history-particularly that of its intelligentsia-from the reign of tsar Nicholas I to Stalin's time. Ivan Pavlov was born to a family of priests in provincial Riazan before the serfs were emancipated, and made his home and professional success in the booming capital of St. Petersburg in late imperial Russia. He suffered the cataclysmic destruction of his world during the Bolshevik seizure of power and civil war of 1917-21, rebuilt his life in his seventies as a "prosperous dissident" during the Leninist 1920s, and flourished professionally as never before in the 1930s industrialization, revolution, and terror of Stalin times. Using a wide variety of previously unavailable archival materials, Todes tells a vivid story of that life and redefines Pavlov's legacy. Pavlov was not, in fact, a behaviorist who believed that psychology should address only external behaviors; rather, he sought to explain the emotional and intellectual life of animals and humans, "the torments of our consciousness." This iconic "objectivist" was actually a profoundly anthropomorphic thinker whose science was suffused with his own experiences, values, and subjective interpretations. Todes's story of this powerful personality and extraordinary man is based upon interviews with surviving coworkers and family members (along with never-before-analyzed taped interviews from the 1960s and 1970s), examination of hundreds of scientific works by Pavlov and his coworkers, and close analysis of materials from some twenty-five archives. The materials range from the records of his student years at Riazan Seminary to the transcripts of the Communist Party cells in his labs, and from his scientific manuscripts and notebooks to his political speeches; they include revealing love letters to his future wife and correspondence with hundreds of scholars, artists, and Communist Party leaders; and memoirs by many coworkers, his daughter, his wife, and his lover. The product of more than twenty years of research, this is the first scholarly biography of the physiologist to be published in any language.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 15, 2014

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780199394449

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780199394449
      • File size: 8724 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      October 1, 2014

      Todes (history of medicine, Johns Hopkins Univ.; Ivan Pavlov: Exploring the Animal Machine) follows Ivan Pavlov's life (1849-1936) from childhood and seminary school through his relationship with his mentor Il'ia Fadeevich Tsion; Tsion's decline; and where Pavlov went from there. Written in amazing detail, the book is well documented throughout with chapter notes and a lengthy bibliography, and will be accessible to educated lay readers. The intimate narrative discusses what Pavlov may have been thinking at different points in his life, referencing material that would lead to these conclusions. VERDICT Through this title, Russianists will get a clear picture of the country during Pavlov's time, and from his vantage, while physiologists and psychiatrists will find an accessible perspective on the scientist's works and research. No dogs will salivate, but historians of the era may delight in the level of detail this book has to offer.--Dawn Lowe-Wincentsen, Oregon Inst. of Technology, Portland

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      October 1, 2014
      An expansive scholarly biography of Russia's most eminent scientist. Todes (Institute of History of Medicine/Johns Hopkins Univ.; Pavlov's Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise, 2001, etc.) traces the evolution of Ivan Pavlov's groundbreaking discoveries in the context of Russian history over the span of his life (1849-1936). This is the culmination of a decadeslong study of the scientist, whose name is iconic in the world of behaviorist psychology but whose work, according to Todes, is misunderstood. The author establishes that, unlike American behaviorists, Pavlov never "denied the importance or even the existence of an inner, subjective world. He also never used the term "conditioned reflex." He used the term "conditional" to describe the salivation of dogs expecting food upon receiving a signal such as the sound of a bell. The intention of the term was to distinguish "conditional reflexes," which might or might not occur, from automatic, unconditional responses-e.g., caused by direct contact of food with the salivary glands. By the time Pavlov embarked on his well-known work with dogs, he had already received the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to him in 1904 for his studies on digestive physiology. These involved tracing how the arousal of appetite acted to stimulate "the secretory nerves of the gastric glands" and was followed up by excitations produced when food "excites the specialized nerves in the mucous membrane of the stomach." Politically a liberal, Pavlov welcomed the 1905 revolution, but he was not a supporter of the Bolsheviks. Nevertheless, his prominence on the international stage was significant enough that he was able to pursue his research and even travel abroad. In 1935, a year before his death, he organized and hosted the International Congress of Physiologists in Leningrad. A comprehensive, nuanced picture of Pavlov's life and times and his seminal contributions to science.

      COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

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  • English

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