During the academic years 1891–1894, the least pleasant and satisfying part of Pavlov’s weekly routine was undoubtedly his participation in faculty meetings at the Military-Medical Academy and the six hours of weekly lectures on pharmacology, hydrotherapy, and balneology that he delivered to third-year medical students there in his capacity as assistant professor of pharmacology.1
Faculty meetings were especially unpleasant because Pavlov was constantly at loggerheads with the powerful director of the Academy, Viktor Pashutin. The faculty had made Pashutin the Academy’s first elected director with high hopes that he would reverse the institution’s decline, democratize it, and reinforce its reputation as the center of the laboratory revolution in Russian medicine. Pavlov was of course positively inclined toward the director after Pashutin’s important role in his own appointment, and the two had much in common as advocates of scientific medicine. Trained in physiology by Pavlov’s boyhood hero, Ivan Sechenov, Pashutin sought to make his specialty, pathology, an experimental science, and, while working both with European luminaries and with Botkin, had concentrated on integrating the lab into medical training, research, and practice.2
Quickly disillusioning his supporters, however, he ruled with a strong, often ruthless, hand—filling vacancies with his own students and using the power of his position to bend the faculty to his will. The rules governing service to the Russian state gave him one particularly potent weapon: after twenty-five years of service, a Russian professor faced mandatory retirement. If the director of that professor’s institution petitioned for an extension, his employment could be extended by any number of successive five-year contracts. The bureaucracy routinely approved such requests—but if the director did not request an extension, the professor’s career was over. Since the state service of many professors began in their mid-twenties, retirement often loomed by age fifty. (Because Pavlov had begun his schooling late due to his childhood accident and had required an extra year to complete both university and medical school, his clock began ticking relatively late. Still, he could have been forced to retire from the Academy in 1905 at age fifty-six.) Pashutin demonstrated throughout the 1890s that he was quite prepared to retire uncooperative faculty members, so professors were strongly motivated to remain in his good graces.
Pavlov, however, began immediately to clash with the director over various appointments. In September 1891, he objected vociferously to Pashutin’s use of “unlawful” procedures and “pressure” to assure the appointment of his own student, Petr Al’bitskii, to the chair of general and experimental pathology, and in protest boycotted the ballot. Al’bitskii was elected, and Pavlov was reprimanded for his “disloyalty” by the faculty scholarly secretary, a Pashutin ally. Raging against the selection of this “cathedral archpriest” (like Pavlov, he was a seminary graduate), Pavlov protested to the minister of war—who also reprimanded him severely.3 Two years later, when filling a temporary lectureship in the department of geology and mineralogy, Pashutin interpreted Academy regulations imaginatively to permit the election of an ally who lacked a doctoral degree. Pavlov objected loudly—and again voted in vain against Pashutin’s favorite.4 After this episode, Pavlov demonstratively carried a copy of the Academy statutes with him to every faculty meeting. He suffered helplessly in the minority on numerous academic issues throughout the 1890s—for example, opposing Pashutin’s proposal to pay faculty members for reviewing works submitted for academic prizes (the director could thus reward his allies financially) and objecting to the director’s decision to grant higher priority to the formation of a department of history of medicine than to a department of psychology (Pashutin wanted to appoint his student Skorichenko to the new position, and succeeded in doing so).5
In the 1890s Pashutin rid himself of four faculty opponents—including Pavlov’s good friend Dobrovol’skii—by retiring them according to state statute. According to Pavlov, even his attempt to organize a farewell dinner for the foursome was foiled by Pashutin’s displeasure and the faculty’s “servility.” Pavlov complained loudly to coworkers and friends that Pashutin had retaliated by postponing his promotion to full professor until 1897 and preventing Pavlov’s nominees from receiving Academy-sponsored European study trips and positions at the Academy’s institute for graduate studies. (Indeed, only one of Pavlov’s candidates was granted an overseas study trip between 1890 and 1901.) His friends on the faculty tried to restrain him, but to no avail—he fought Pashutin constantly and, according to Serafima, regularly returned home from the Saturday faculty meetings “completely broken” and enraged by the faculty’s “cowardice and stupidity.”6
He battled Pashutin literally to the very end—to Pashutin’s end. At a faculty meeting of January 1901, they were again quarreling—this time over the choice of a new librarian. During their confrontation Pashutin muttered worriedly that “I feel poorly—my pulse is at 120”—but nevertheless began reading the search committee’s report to prepare for the vote. A few moments later he stopped and suddenly died.7
Before his demise, and despite their mutual hostility, Pashutin, for his own reasons, had granted Pavlov a big boon: forcibly retiring Tarkhanov and transferring Pavlov to the professorship in physiology. Tarkhanov completed his twenty-fifth year of state service in 1895, by which time he had incurred Pashutin’s disfavor. Declining to petition for an extension, the director forced the forty-nine-year-old professor to relinquish his post. Having rid himself of a faculty opponent, Pashutin also wanted to bring his former student Kosturin—professor of pharmacology at Kharkov University—to the Academy. He decided to move Pavlov to the department of physiology and thereby free pharmacology for his own protégé.
Pavlov later insisted that he “suspected nothing of these maneuvers behind the scene”; yet he was, of course, delighted, in May 1895, to become the Academy’s assistant professor of physiology. Notwithstanding the circumstances, he must have taken special pleasure in replacing Tarkhanov and occupying Tsion’s former position.8 Much more important to Pavlov than the Academy’s physiology lab—which became an important venue for his research only after it was moved to a new building in 1904—was the opportunity to use his new position to preach his view of physiology to generations of medical students and to find recruits among them for his lab enterprise.
Lecturing to second-year medical students, he confronted the same attitude as had Tsion twenty years earlier—that physiology was merely a “theoretical science” of little practical use to the physician. Pavlov constantly combated this view by emphasizing the importance of what he termed “experimental thinking” or “physiological thinking.” That is, like many other advocates of scientific medicine at a time when lab science had as yet provided relatively little to improve the treatment of patients, he argued that the value of his science resided not only in specific, clinically useful knowledge but also in a fruitful, modern way of thinking.
For this reason, his lectures relied as much as possible upon experiments conducted before his audience’s eyes—a “physiology in experiments,” as Pavlov and his admirers termed it. “I want to show you how science is done,” he reminded students constantly. Physiology in Experiments was transcribed by students and extensively reworked under his editorial supervision in 1898–1899. Those students met with him frequently at his home over tea as he edited their transcripts. “He told us that the main task was not to put together a compilation, but rather, departing from a description of the experiment as a scientific fact, to give comrades a grounding in the theoretical regularities of the functions of organs and systems.”9 These theoretical regularities—the constant themes of Pavlov’s lectures—were that the organism is a complex machine governed by determined processes that are regulated by its nervous system, and that rigorous experimentation revealed the determinist relations between external stimuli and the organism’s responses, as well as between the animal’s organ systems themselves.
In Physiology in Experiments, Pavlov concentrated on areas of his own research: the first semester was devoted almost entirely to digestion, ending with a few weeks on circulation, which also occupied most of the second semester. There followed one week on respiration, two hours on internal secretions (endocrinology was just beginning to develop late in the century), two weeks on nervous-muscular physiology, and one week on the central nervous system. The experiments were often difficult to prepare, and various contingencies influenced how well they actually unfolded during class. During the 1895–1896 academic year, Pavlov arrived at the Academy early to help prepare them; thereafter, this became the responsibility of his assistants.
He was a memorable lecturer. Addressing a large audience with varied degrees of interest in his subject, he inspired a select group of students—who thrilled to his skills and internalized his perspective on his subject, sometimes changing their life course as a result—while being incomprehensible and comical to others, who had little interest in physiology beyond obtaining a passing grade on their path to medical practice. This division was clearly reflected in the geography of the large auditorium in which Pavlov lectured. His coworkers, interested St. Petersburg physicians, and the most avid students sat in the front rows, from which the experimental demonstrations were visible. The mass of students sat further back, from which the professor’s lively response to the experiment was much more striking than the procedure itself. For each group, lectures and lecturer created an enduring impression. On Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, Pavlov entered the lecture hall at precisely 9:00 a.m., holding a timepiece and surrounded by his coworkers, who took their seats in the front row. (On Thursdays he lectured for one hour, on Fridays and Saturdays for two.) Students saw an energetic man of moderate height with a high, wide forehead topped by a cone of graying hair, with lively gray eyes, heavy dark eyebrows, and a fluffy gray beard. All stood upon his entry, and he bowed in acknowledgment, then sat in a bentwood chair, crossed his legs, and set his arms on the armrests. He spoke without notes in a simple conversational tone, without theatrics or pretense—“as if talking about his affairs in a domestic setting”—in a clear, high-pitched voice. Emphasizing the major points, he deliberately omitted complicating details. He avoided foreign terms, objecting even to the neologism “hormone” (“Why can’t they just say ‘physiological exciters’?”), and employed simple picturesque phrases such as “the acid forces out the pancreatic juice” and “bile knocks out pepsin.” Soon the hands were in motion, gesturing constantly. He dressed inappropriately and in stark violation of military regulations. The Academy was a military institution—by the late nineteenth century, faculty members were permitted to wear civilian dress off campus, but were obligated to lecture in uniform. Pavlov should have been wearing military trousers and a buttoned military frock adorned in later years with the general’s silver shoulder-straps to which he was entitled by his rank of active state counselor. Instead, the frock was unbuttoned, revealing his customary civilian attire: a soft white shirt with black butterfly tie, grey vest, and matching pants.
He was always meticulously groomed and carefully dressed, so this disrespect for the military uniform was not accidental. (During the upheavals of 1905–1907, he would suggest at a faculty meeting that the Academy be entirely demilitarized and moved to another ministry.) Although he lectured at the Academy three times a week for more than thirty years, he purchased only two military frocks—and would have managed with just one had a lab attendant not borrowed and gambled away the first. Predictably, the medical students—in an increasingly rebellious mood during the late 1890s and early 1900s—enjoyed their professor’s impertinent manner of dress. Some even began to emulate it until firmly corrected by their staff officers. One day it was announced that minister of war Kuropatkin might attend Pavlov’s lecture. “Pavlov decided, after much swearing, that for this occasion he would have to put on not only the military frock but the trousers as well. He arrived in the auditorium in complete military dress, with his coat buttoned. The students greeted him with laughter. The reason for this hilarity was that there was still attached to the trousers, which Pavlov had never worn before, one of those slips of paper on which Russian tailors put the measurements of their clients. “What are they laughing at?” Pavlov asked crossly. When it was explained, he tore the paper off angrily and said: “The devil knows all the foolish things we have to do!” Kuropatkin never appeared.10
For both the enthusiasts who sat in front and the bored obligatory attendees who huddled further back, experimental demonstrations often proved memorable. Only the students in the front rows could see these clearly; most had to rely on the lecturer’s description of what was transpiring. For this reason, Pavlov usually called one student, his “honorable witness,” to stand next to the experimental stand and testify to the truth of Pavlov’s narrative. “Either from embarrassment or because the complicated experiment was so difficult to follow,” Babkin later recalled, this witness “usually stood by as dumb as a fish or nodding his head, not always in the right place, in confirmation of what the professor was saying.”11
One student from the back rows described the enjoyable “novelty” of Physiology in Experiments this way: sometime during the lecture a cart would roll into the auditorium and students would see a sedated dog strapped to it. Assistants had done something to the animal that these students did not understand. “Then Pavlov would approach the dog and also do something which we did not see, and if the experiment succeeded, then Pavlov would inevitably be delighted, and his pleasure would infect us as well; we were also delighted, although we didn’t understand why. But if the experiment did not succeed, then Pavlov would get irritated and scold his assistants with no mind to the audience, and then, too, we would be delighted at seeing the gesticulating and abusive Pavlov.” The main assistant at this time, Savich, “suffered the most from these incidents.” He would stand “disheveled, his face shrunken into a fist, with his pince-nez always falling off his nose”—making a most “pathetic” sight.12
Those inevitable moments when an experiment went awry made a lasting impression on everybody: “Ivan Petrovich would then get irritated and sometimes was very sharp and even crude with his coworkers”; “Ivan Petrovich suffered greatly from every failure, especially if it occurred as the result of inattention or carelessness. Pavlov would pounce furiously upon the guilty party”; and this from his assistant Boris Babkin: “When the lecture was accompanied by an experiment, Pavlov became extremely animated and, if all went well, was genuinely pleased.... Often he would take the electrode or test tubes out of his assistant’s hand and start to stimulate a nerve or collect the flowing juice, and sometimes his interference upset the progress of the experiment. Then he would become greatly irritated—with the assistant of course. If an experiment was for some reason unsuccessful, Pavlov without hesitation would begin blaming the assistant then and there, to the great delight of the students, who loved such a ‘circus.’”13 Each of Pavlov’s longtime coworkers had their favorite such tale. Frolov told this one: Pavlov’s assistant was holding a lamp with reflector over the operating area; the sheet covering the dog suddenly flipped up and the dog’s tail appeared over the sterile field. Pavlov exploded and ordered the unfortunate assistant to give the lamp to another assistant and hold the dog’s tail himself until the end of the operation.14
Pavlov loved watching a tried and true experiment unfold successfully, and frequently became lost in his enthusiasm, sometimes forgetting that his audience had different sensibilities. For example, he enjoyed performing the sham-feeding experiment with an esophagotomized dog by which he had conclusively demonstrated that appetite excited the first phase of gastric secretion. Specific dogs, accustomed to a large audience, were used to perform reliably during these demonstrations. One student, however, described his own reaction to the sham-feeding trial this way:
There was placed before the dog a bowl with pieces of meat. It swallowed them greedily, but they fell out through the esophagus back into the bowl. The dog, clearly famished, again seized the pieces of meat, again swallowed them, and they again fell back into the bowl. Covered in saliva, these pieces became more and more repulsive, but the dog continued to swallow them greedily. And all this time the assistants followed the quantity of gastric juice secreted into a tube on the animal’s stomach. The picture was repulsive, but Pavlov walked about satisfied, rubbing his hands.15
He repeatedly asked students to interrupt his lecture with any questions. When a student posed a good one he was visibly pleased, but he complained constantly about the rarity of such events—which he often used to illustrate the passivity of the “Russian type.” Unlike Tsion, Pavlov was an easy grader. The oral exams that he administered at the end of the course were well known for their laxness and were almost impossible to fail. A particularly obtuse response to a question might elicit some screaming, but the session ended dependably with what the professor called a “Pavlov 3”—that is, a “gentleman’s C.” One backbencher noted that “This quite satisfied the students, and as a result we completed the course knowing absolutely nothing.”16 Many, however, learned quite a bit—and a steady trickle were so inspired by what they saw that they requested Pavlov’s permission to work in his lab while still medical students. The appearance of such students always delighted him—not only from pedagogical pride, but also because he wanted to recruit them both to his lab and physiology in general. To this end, shortly after assuming the professorship in physiology he emulated Tsion by offering third-year students a special course on some topic in physiology every other year. In the first of these he delivered seven or eight lectures on the physiology of the vagus nerve—analyzing the scientific literature and discussing details about experiments and their interpretation. Quite a few attendees later became his coworkers and went on to careers in physiology.