As master of the physiology division at the IEM, Pavlov established a unique laboratory system, a physiology factory that expressed his own style as a scientist and manager.
Like that of his mentor Tsion, Pavlov’s scientific vision integrated elements of Claude Bernard’s and Carl Ludwig’s approaches to physiology. With Bernard, he viewed the organism as a complex, sensitively interconnected, and fully determined machine, and sought to investigate its vital properties by studying organs. Pavlov’s determination to study the intact, relatively normal organism was even more pronounced than that of the French physiologist. During his sojourn in Europe, he had been impressed by animal technologies developed by Ludwig and Heidenhain—the former’s isolated heart and the latter’s isolated stomach—that facilitated experiments on a functioning organ, and this had reinforced Tsion’s emphasis upon the role of surgical creativity in physiological investigations. Also like Tsion, Pavlov embraced Ludwig’s commitment to expressing his results in “objective” quantitative terms, ideally in the form of a “precise scientific formula.” Yet, while pondering Ludwig’s and Heidenhain’s contrasting experimental styles during his sojourn in western Europe, Pavlov, in a Bernardian spirit, had rejected Ludwig’s “physics method,” identifying with Heidenhain’s more specifically “physiological thinking.” “We are not physicists, who can extract the numbers from an experiment and then leave in order to calculate the results in an office,” he once explained. “The physiological experiment must always depend on a mass of the smallest circumstances and surprises, which must be noticed at the time of the experiment, otherwise our material loses its real sense.” That intimate knowledge of the experiment was especially important for Pavlov to make the interpretive decisions necessary to identify fully determined results in experiments upon an intact animal in which various uncontrolled variables were always at play.
As a manager, then, Pavlov sought to combine the intimacy of Heidenhain’s style with the advantages of a large lab like Ludwig’s. Here, too, he had digested the experiences of his university and wilderness years. Tsion, Heidenhain, and Ludwig had all impressed him with their ability to unify their labs and inspire coworkers through the force of their personality, their infectious enthusiasm, and occasional laboratory-wide discussions. Ludwig’s lab was much the largest of the three, but his interests were very broad and his coworkers researched a staggering variety of subjects. Pavlov focused his inquiries much more narrowly. In his own large lab, then, he combined an authoritarian structure and cooperative ethos that united coworkers with a single investigative mission and a single “laboratory view,” allowing him to use them as extensions of his own sensory reach while enabling him constantly to monitor the work process, to control the interpretive moments in experiments, to incorporate results into his developing ideas, and to convert them efficiently into marketable products.
When the Institute formally opened in 1891, Pavlov’s physiology division occupied five rooms in the single wooden building that housed all the scientific divisions. He used the smallest room for surgical operations and the four larger ones to house animals and conduct experiments. In addition to a budget more than five times greater than that of any other Russian physiologist, he had the use of two attendants and one paid assistant.1 However lavish by Russian standards, these facilities quickly became cramped and inadequate. Designed as a workshop for a handful of men, they were soon swarming with coworkers (praktikanty)—twelve in 1892, seventeen in 1893—and the animals for their experiments.2
The influx of coworkers that caused these problems also cemented his previously shaky loyalty to the Institute. A friend recalled that “When Pavlov became convinced that one could acquire here all the means for scientific work and that the physicians collaborating with him would be able to work without spending their own resources for experiments, that everything would be provided to him—dogs, feed, and, mainly, that he would have many coworkers—this bound him entirely to the institute.”3
The space problem was resolved in 1893–1894, when an unexpected contribution from Alfred Nobel enabled the physiology division to acquire a separate building. This was an unconditional gift, but the ailing sixty-year-old philanthropist did express the hope that the beneficiary would address two questions that he found particularly pressing: Would transfusions of blood from a young, healthy animal (Nobel suggested a giraffe) revivify an ailing animal of the same, or another, species? Could the stomach of a healthy animal be transplanted to an ailing one with salutary effect? Nobel’s funds were used to finance a two-story stone addition to Pavlov’s lab.4
The new quarters, constructed under Pavlov’s close supervision and completed in 1894, more than doubled his lab’s size. The basement became a full-service kennel with individual cells for experimental animals, the first floor provided three more rooms for experiments, and the second floor housed a surgical and recovery complex that embodied Pavlov’s commitment to investigating the normal functioning of organs through what he termed “physiological surgery” and the “chronic experiment.”
For Pavlov, the “chronic experiment” allowed the physiologist to investigate normal physiological processes that, he believed, were often distorted during an “acute experiment” (a term he used synonymously with “vivisection”). In contrast to acute experiments, which were conducted upon an animal immediately after an operation from which it was soon to perish, chronic experiments began only after the animal had recovered from surgery and regained its “normal” physiological state. Acute experiments had their uses—and Pavlov employed them himself—but they yielded only “analytic” knowledge, not a “synthetic” understanding of the organism at work. Shortly after completion of his new building, he explained that acute experiments conducted on a freshly operated-upon and bleeding animal that was either writhing in pain or heavily sedated so distorted physiological processes that they led inevitably to “crude errors.” It was impossible for the experimenter reliably to untangle the results of the operation itself from normal physiological functions.
In chronic experiments, on the other hand, “the physiologist counts on the animal living after the removal of parts of organs, after the disturbance of connections between them, the establishment of a new connection, and so forth”—in other words, after a surgical procedure that afforded permanent access to the physiological processes of an animal that had been purposefully altered but remained essentially normal.5 The surgical and recovery complex, then, embodied Pavlov’s goal of exploring in an intact animal normal physiological processes—specifically, the responses of the digestive glands to various stimuli (for example, to teasing with food, the act of eating, or the passage of various foods through the digestive system).
The “normalcy” of the experimental animals undergoing chronic experiments was, then, central to lab work and a source of Pavlov’s authority with both physicians and other scientists. Physicians who drew upon clinical experience to dispute the lab’s results were often reminded, in the sympathetic tones of a fellow medical man, that they encountered an impossibly complex mass of interconnected phenomena in their daily practice and that these could be disentangled only in the lab. Similarly, when the experimental results of other scientists conflicted with Pavlov’s own, these could be explained (and either reconciled or dismissed) by reference to the physiological abnormalities that resulted from their crude acute experiments.
The notion of normalcy inevitably entailed a series of interpretive moments. Pavlov acknowledged that physiological surgery and chronic experiments always involved some departure from normal physiological relations (“removal of parts of organs...disturbance of connections between them, the establishment of a new connection, and so forth”). Since the lab setting itself, to say nothing of the surgical operations performed there, always had some effect on the dog’s behavior and reactions—how was one to determine whether the dog remained acceptably normal? For example, were a dog’s digestive processes functioning normally if, after an operation, its appetite diminished, it accepted only one kind of food, or it lost weight? It fell, then, to the experimenter to answer such questions and to affirm the normalcy of an experimental dog.
Or to affirm its lack of normalcy. Pavlov and his coworkers were, after all, dealing with a large, complex organism; and pravil’nye results were inevitably difficult to obtain. Feeding two different dogs the identical quantity of the same food always produced somewhat different secretory results and sometimes radically different ones. Even the results of identical experiments on a single dog varied. For Pavlov (following Bernard), these variations reflected the uncontrolled variables that concealed determined regularities behind a veil of apparent spontaneity. So, when two dogs yielded strikingly different results, one animal was pronounced relatively normal and the other relatively abnormal. Divergent results with a single dog were handled similarly.
This notion of normalcy, then, provided simultaneously a laboratory goal, a reservoir of interpretive flexibility, and a source of authority for the lab’s knowledge claims. To the outside world, Pavlov consistently represented his experimental dogs as normal—as happy, energetic, and long-lived. Within the lab, however, he and his coworkers struggled constantly to create and define normalcy, while also exploiting fully the interpretive flexibility afforded by such judgments.
Since chronic experiments depended upon the animal surviving surgery, Pavlov conceded no essential difference between physiological surgery and clinical surgery upon humans. In a speech to the Society of Russian Physicians on “the surgical method of investigation of the secretory phenomena of the stomach” (1894), and more extensively in Lectures on the Work of the Main Digestive Glands (1897), he proudly presented the plan of his surgical ward—“the first case of a special operative division in a physiological lab.” Dogs were washed and dried in one room, sedated and prepared for surgery in a second, and operated upon in a third. A separate room was devoted to the sterilization of instruments and surgical staff. Separated from the surgical ward by a partition were individual recovery rooms for dogs. These were well lit and ventilated, heated with hot air, and washed by a water pipe with minute apertures, enabling rooms to be “copiously syringed from the corridor without [anyone] entering the room.”
For the physiologist to master nature’s most complex phenomena, Bemard had argued, his workshop must be “the most complicated of all laboratories.” In this spirit, Pavlov explained to the Society of Russian Physicians that the demands of chronic experimentation—of this qualitative extension of the physiologist’s grasp on the organic whole—required a radical expansion of the lab’s physical plant. “In the final analysis, the very type and character of physiological institutes should be changed; they should definitely include a surgical section answering the demands of surgical rooms in general.” For physicians in his audience, this was yet another of Pavlov’s constant injunctions that they use their social connections to secure greater financial support for physiology; for Russian physiologists, it was a reminder that only Pavlov possessed the resources to practice what he preached.6
In the years 1891 to 1904, about a hundred people worked in Pavlov’s lab. As chief, Pavlov provided the lab’s scientific-managerial vision and ruled in firm patriarchal fashion. He hired coworkers, assigned research topics, performed complex operations on dogs, participated in coworkers’ experiments as he saw fit, edited and approved completed work, rewarded success and punished failure. His ideas governed the lab, and he tolerated no alternatives. He was also the spokesman for the lab’s achievements, defending his coworkers and explaining the broader significance of their work when they delivered papers or defended dissertations to outside audiences.
Pavlov himself wrote articles on a wide range of specialized subjects—including the nature of pepsin, the effect of hunger on the stomach, and the effects of a double vagotomy—but most important were his periodic publications synthesizing lab results and explaining their significance for physiology and medicine. These included “Vivisection” (1893), “On the Surgical Method of Investigation of the Secretory Phenomena of the Stomach” (1894), “On the Mutual Relations of Physiology and Medicine in Questions of Digestion” (1894–1895), Lectures on the Work of the Main Digestive Glands (1897), “The Contemporary Unification in Experiment of the Main Aspects of Medicine, as Exemplified by Digestion” (1899), “Physiological Surgery of the Digestive Canal” (1902), and, during the lab’s transition to research on conditional reflexes, “The Psychical Secretion of the Salivary Glands (Complex Nervous Phenomena in the Work of the Salivary Glands)” (1904).
Most coworkers came to the lab between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five during their first decade of work as practical physicians, and lacked training in physiology beyond that provided in a single medical school course. Many were military physicians, and all but one were male. Of the 75 percent for whom information is available, twenty-eight were physicians in St. Petersburg’s hospitals and clinics, thirteen served in hospitals and clinics outside of the capital, ten came from the empire’s academic institutions (universities and institutes), ten were rural physicians, and nine worked for the medical department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Like their chief, they were drawn almost entirely from the diverse middling social stratum known in Russia as the raznochintsy. The great majority were Russian, and a disproportionate number were Jewish. Coworkers usually spent one to two years in the lab, during which time about 75 percent wrote dissertations, defended them at the Military-Medical Academy, and received their doctorates in medicine.7
The nature of this workforce—young and transient, largely untrained in physiology, and intent on gaining a quick doctoral degree—facilitated Pavlov’s use of it as extensions of his own eyes and hands. Describing the most numerous contingent among them, military physicians pursuing their doctorates at the Military-Medical Academy, Babkin noted that, as a consequence of their provincial background and hurried training, they were “very backward in medicine and even more in science.”8 Coworkers were not, of course, an undifferentiated mass, and at special junctures in laboratory production—when the chief was engaged in “retooling”—he sometimes employed individuals for their special expertise. But when the physiology factory was operating normally, their function was to conduct and report experiments according to the chief’s strict instructions—to feed him data for his own expert interpretation.
Indeed, Pavlov himself conducted few, if any experiments. His coworkers conducted the thousands of trials that filled the lab’s “storehouse of information,” painstakingly collecting, recording, measuring, and analyzing the dogs’ secretory reactions to various excitants during experiments that often continued for eight or ten hours at a time. The strains of this work are clearly, and poignantly, evident in an obituary for Iulian Iablonskii, a Pavlov assistant who died in 1898 after a protracted mental illness: “Increasingly fascinated by physiology, he soon decisively abandoned the clinic for the laboratory. For entire days he sat, collecting digestive juices, making calculations, and later, as an assistant to the professor, making necessary preparations for experiments and complex operations. In his third year...there appeared the first signs of over-exhaustion, and then a sinister mental illness. Undoubtedly already ill, the deceased defended his dissertation and was sent to the provinces.” Iablonskii’s fate was unique, but the rigorous work process he endured was not.9
Pavlov also had at his disposal each year two paid assistants who provided a relatively stable supervisory stratum above the transitory work force. Although they conducted scientific research, their principal task was to incorporate coworkers into the production process—to inculcate the lab’s procedures and culture, facilitate the smooth progress of their work, and keep the chief informed of their abilities, progress, and problems. All but one of these assistants were physicians with a developing specialty of some particular use. Vasilii Massen, a gynecologist, established the lab’s initial aseptic and antiseptic procedures; Nikolai Damaskin and Evgenii Ganike were biochemists; and Alexander Sokolov brought a background in histology. Damaskin and Genadii Smirnov came to the lab with doctorates already in hand, while Massen, Iablonskii, and Sokolov acquired their doctorates for theses researched there. None possessed a broad physiological education beyond that acquired at Pavlov’s side. As long-standing members of the lab, Ganike, Sokolov, and Smirnov became bearers of its institutional memory.10
Ganike played an especially important role. After arriving in 1894 from the collapsed syphilology division, he became Pavlov’s close collaborator until the chief’s death in 1936. His background in chemistry and technical virtuosity made him the lab’s resident inventor and problem solver. He was also Pavlov’s all-purpose right-hand man and chief supervisor. Ganike handled the budget, supervised its chief moneymaking enterprise, and drafted the annual reports for the chief’s approval. He also enjoyed a close personal relationship with Prince Ol’denburgskii. When Pavlov was absent or busy, Ganike, whom the prince addressed with the familiar pronoun ty, represented the physiology division at meetings of the Institute’s governing council.
The other long-term workers were the attendants charged with caring for the dogs and preparing them for experiments, assisting during surgical procedures, troubleshooting at the bench, and keeping the lab in order. Several attendants worked in the lab for many years, accumulating important craft knowledge. Two attendants, Nikolai Kharitonov and a certain Timofei, thus became, as one coworker noted, “indispensable participants in each experiment, and such active participants that they were not so much helpers as, rather, almost the directors.” Another wrote of Kharitonov and a younger attendant, Ivan Shuvalov, that their accumulated experience with the sometimes puzzling behavior of dogs and fistulas enabled them to “provide in many cases absolutely invaluable assistance.” They also became the chief’s irreplaceable assistants during surgical operations.11
The workforce, then, consisted of the chief, assistants, attendants, and coworkers, all with their prescribed roles. Their labors, however, revolved around one last participant—one whose personalities and idiosyncrasies were no less familiar than that of the chief and his crew: the experimental dogs.
Modified by ingenious surgical procedures for Pavlov’s investigative goals, these dogs were simultaneously technologies, physiological objects of study, and products. As technologies, lab dogs were created in the lab to produce something else: particular kinds of facts. As with any technology, their existence and design influenced the organization and nature of the work process. Physiologists incapable of creating, say, a dog with an isolated stomach could reproduce the lab’s experiments only by acquiring a dog from Pavlov or journeying to St. Petersburg. These dogs were also “wonderful material in all regards for teaching,” as Pavlov put it, and so “no less indispensable for university laboratories than the most important physiological apparatuses.”12
Yet the Pavlovian dog was not simply a technology—it was also a physiological object of study, a living, functioning, infinitely complex organism. Designed to perform “normally” in experiments, the lab dog possessed biological attributes that often complicated its use as a technology for the production of pravil’nye facts. That tension lay at the very heart of Pavlov’s research and interpretive practices, as is evident from a closer look at the principles and practices of his physiological surgery.
The varied operations performed in Pavlov’s surgical ward to produce a dog for chronic experiments were developed to satisfy four basic criteria: the product of the digestive gland must be rendered accessible to the experimenter at any time for measurement and analysis; the reagent in that glandular product must be obtainable in pure form, undiluted by food or the secretions of other glands; the animal must recover to full health and its digestive system must return to normal functioning; and finally, for Pavlov, as a convinced “nervist,” the surgical operations must leave intact the basic nervous relations that controlled physiological processes.13
The simplest and most common operation was implantation of a fistula to draw a portion of salivary, gastric, or pancreatic secretions to the surface of the dog’s body, where it could be collected and analyzed. Fistulas were not original to Pavlov’s lab, but for each digestive gland, he and his coworkers refined the operation to meet the chief’s four requirements. This proved relatively simple with the gastric and salivary glands. Gastric and salivary fistulas diverted only a small portion of glandular secretions to the surface, so any disturbance to normal digestive processes was presumably minimal; both could be opened or closed at the experimenter’s discretion, and neither resulted in any visible pathological symptoms.14
The creation of a “normal” dog with a pancreatic fistula, however, posed great difficulties. Pavlov himself had struggled with these in the 1880s. In the 1890s, he assigned several coworkers to improve the pancreatic fistula, but conceded even in 1902 that, despite “much labor and attention,” all existing variants left much to be desired. The problem resided in the complex “physiological connections of this gland” and in the constant leakage of pancreatic juice from the fistulized dog. Escaping pancreatic ferments macerated the abdominal wall, causing ulceration and bleeding, and the chronic loss of pancreatic fluid undermined the dog’s health in dramatic and mysterious ways. Animals would suddenly fall ill a few weeks or even months after the operation, losing their appetite and developing various nervous disturbances; sometimes “acute general weakness” was followed by fibrillations and death. Conceding that the pancreatic fistula was “not ideal,” Pavlov insisted that its usefulness was nevertheless clear in “the numerous, clear, indubitable, and decisive results of investigations.” The ‘normalcy’ of these dog technologies, however, always remained problematic.15
A second standard operation was the ingenious, even diabolical esophagotomy that Pavlov had devised in 1888–1889 to demonstrate that the vagus nerves controlled the gastric glands. His point of departure here was a view shared by his former seminary teacher in psychology, Glebov, and the great majority of physiologists: that the psyche (whatever its essential nature) acted through the central nervous system. So if Pavlov could demonstrate that the psyche played a role in gastric secretion, this would also demonstrate a role for the vagus. The leading authority on gastric secretion, Heidenhain, recognized only two stimuli of gastric secretion, the direct mechanical effect of food in the stomach on the gastric membrane and the subsequent absorption of the products formed by the contact between food and gastric secretions. He conceded, however, that he would be compelled to recognize the role of the vagus if it were proved that “the mere sight of food is sufficient to elicit secretion in hungry animals.”16
Sham-feeding an esophagotomized dog with salivary fistula. Food consumed by the dog excites its appetite but, never reaching the stomach (A), falls out the aperture of the esophagotomy (C) and back into the feeding bowl. The resulting gastric secretion (“appetite juice”) flows out through a fistula (E) into a receptacle. V. N. Boldyrev, “Natural’nyi zheludochnyi sok, kak lechebnoe sredstvo, i sposob ego dobyvaniia,” Russkii Vrach, 1907, no. 5: 156
The purpose of the esophagotomy, then, was to demonstrate that the psyche—appetite itself—elicited gastric secretion. The operation divided the gullet in the neck and caused its divided ends to heal separately into an angle of the skin incision. This accomplished “the complete anatomical separation of the cavities of the mouth and stomach.” Food swallowed by an esophagotomized dog fell out the opening from the mouth cavity to the neck rather than proceeding down the digestive tract. The esophagotomized dog was also provided with a gastric fistula, allowing the experimenter to analyze the reaction of the gastric glands to the act of eating.
After recovering from the operation, dogs were both “teased” and “sham-fed.” For teasing, food was waved in front of a hungry animal, while in sham-feeding the animal chewed and swallowed the food, which fell out of the aperture in their necks without reaching the stomach. In Pavlov and Shumova-Simanovskaia’s experiments of 1888–1889, teasing alone did not elicit gastric secretion, but sham-feeding did—proving to Pavlov’s satisfaction that the psyche was the first stimulus of gastric secretion. Only in the new facilities at the IEM were Pavlov and coworker Anton Sanotskii able to obtain positive results with teasing alone. This they attributed to the “suitable hygienic conditions” there, in which most esophagotomized dogs survived the operation, recovered weight rapidly, and returned to their normal state. “A more or less lively representation of food,” without any physical contact whatsoever, was, then, itself a powerful exciter of gastric secretion. This psychic excitation was absent if the vagus was severed, and so clearly acted on the gastric glands through that nerve.17
Sham-feeding an esophagotomized dog equipped with a gastric fistula provided access to the gastric secretions produced by the act of eating. The experimenter collected these secretions through the fistula at five-minute intervals, later measuring them and analyzing their contents. This dog technology also allowed the lab to collect virtually unlimited quantities of gastric juice. Since ingested food never reached the stomach, however, it did not permit investigation of gastric secretion during the second phase of normal digestion, when food was present in the stomach.
This task was addressed by the complex dog technology that soon became both a symbol of Pavlov’s surgical virtuosity and the source of the lab’s cardinal theoretical achievements. In 1894, after a series of frustrating failures, Khizhin and Pavlov finally succeeded in creating and preserving a dog with an isolated stomach (or “Pavlov sac”).
The isolated stomach, as sketched in the appendix of Pavlov coworker P. P. Khizhin’s pivotal doctoral thesis. The top sketch describes the creation of the isolated sac by an incision along the line AB, which creates a pouch composed of the membrane in region C. The bottom sketch portrays the result: the large stomach (region U) is separated from the isolated stomach (region S) by a barrier composed of mucous membrane (the wavy line in the bottom of region U). Vagal innervation is preserved, but food cannot cross from the large to the small stomach. A special fistula can then be inserted in region S for collection of secretions in the isolated stomach. Khizin, Otdelitel’naia (1894), appendix
The isolated stomach operation was difficult and complex, but the principle behind it was simple. The goal was surgically to create an isolated pocket in part of a dog’s stomach—and to do so in such a way that, after the dog’s recovery, the entire stomach continued to work normally while this “small stomach” could be studied separately. As Pavlov explained to the Society of Russian Physicians:
The stomach is divided into two parts: a large part, which remains in place and serves as the normal continuation of the digestive canal, and another, smaller part, completely fenced off from the rest of the stomach and having an opening to the surface through the abdominal wall. The essential thing in this operation is that in one part of this small stomach the barrier [separating it from the large stomach] is formed only of mucous membrane while the muscle and serous layers are preserved, because through them passes the vague nerve, which is the main secretory nerve of the gastric glands. In this manner we acquire in an isolated part of the stomach a completely normal innervation, which gives us the right to take the secretory activity of this part as a true representation of the work of the entire stomach.18
Food, then, came into direct contact only with the large stomach, but it would excite presumably normal gastric secretion in both this large stomach and the isolated sac. Since the isolated stomach remained uncontaminated by food and the products of other glands, the experimenter could extract pure glandular secretions through a glass tube and analyze the secretory responses to various foods during the “normal” digestive process.
Pavlov was not the first to create an isolated stomach, but his substantial variation upon that developed by Rudolf Klemensiewicz and Rudolf Heidenhain reflected his belief in the overriding importance of the nervous system. Heidenhain doubted that central nervous mechanisms played an important role in gastric secretion, so the “Heidenhain stomach” involved transection of the vagus nerves. That sac indeed produced plentiful gastric secretion when excited directly by food, which for Heidenhain constituted yet another proof that the vagus played no role in the normal functioning of the gastric glands. This was the majority view among physiologists—a view from which Pavlov dissented, and all the more vigorously after his experiments with esophagotomized dogs. He therefore modified Heidenhain’s operation, making it “more difficult” but preserving vagal innervation.19
The dogs used in chronic experiments lived much longer than those consumed in acute experiments, and this facilitated a relationship with experimenters that sometimes resembled that between pet and master. Each dog received a name and manifested an identifiable personality. This simultaneously rendered the animal both more and less “normal.” On the one hand, what better testimony to a dog’s normalcy than a recognizable personality? On the other, personalities varied, and that of any single dog inevitably influenced the results of experimental trials, making the results, if not abnormal, at least somewhat idiosyncratic and subject to interpretation.
Had lab dogs been simple, ideal mechanical technologies, the experimenter’s task would have been relatively straightforward: turn them on under conditions prescribed by the chief, then measure and analyze the secretory results. The contradictory nature of these lab animals, however, and the drive to gain from them pravil’nye results, inevitably entailed a series of interpretive moments. Most important was the need to interpret experimental data in light of the dog’s personality.20
Having grappled during his student and wilderness years with the influence of the experimental animal’s psyche upon experimental results, Pavlov now characterized the psyche as a dangerous “source of error.” The dog’s “thoughts about food” threatened constantly to introduce the “arbitrary rule of chance” to experiments and so to produce “completely distorted results.” Only by completely excluding psychic influence could experimenters uncover the otherwise factory-like regularity of the digestive machine. For this reason, experimenters came to work in separate, isolated rooms and were enjoined to “carefully avoid everything that could elicit in the dog thoughts about food.”21
Such procedures, however, could not, even in principle, exclude the psyche from chronic experiments, since a dog’s personality and food tastes shaped the “psychic secretion” that constituted the first phase of its response to a meal. In these trials, then, as Pavlov put, the idiosyncratic psyche acquired “flesh and blood,” and its results were incorporated into descriptions of the pravíl’nye processes of the digestive machine.
So familiar were the secretory consequences of a dog’s psyche and personality that, as one coworker explained, “it is taken as a rule in the laboratory to study the tastes of the dogs under investigation.” Some dogs had pronounced food preferences; others refused the horsemeat offered in the lab or ate it without enthusiasm. “In such picky dogs, sham feeding with an unpleasant or even undistinguished food produces an extremely weak [secretory] effect.” Inattention to the individual character of dogs, he continued, explained the inability of some Western European scientists to elicit gastric secretion by teasing a dog with food:
Dogs exhibit a great variety of characters, which it is well to observe in their relation to food and manner of eating. There are passionate dogs, especially young ones, who are easily excited by the sight of food and are easily subject to teasing; others, to the contrary, have great self-possession and respond with great restraint to teasing with food. Finally, with certain dogs it is as if they understand the deceit being perpetrated upon them and turn their back on the proffered food, apparently from a sense of insult. These dogs only react to food when it falls into their mouth....
Certain dogs are distinguished by a very suspicious or fearful character and only gradually adapt to the laboratory setting and the procedures performed upon them; it stands to reason that the depressed state of these dogs does not facilitate the success of experiments.22
The acknowledged importance of the dog’s psyche made it not only the “main enemy” of the experimenter seeking pravil’nye results, but also his “best friend” when attempting to reconcile conflicting data with lab doctrine. By their very nature, then, lab dogs generated, not clean, unambiguous objective data, but rather complexities requiring interpretive judgments.
These, then, were the forces of production in Pavlov’s physiology factory—its anatomical elements, one might say: the chief, with his scientific vision and investigative goals; a largely temporary workforce of coworkers with limited training and the drive for a quick doctoral degree; and facilities and dog technologies designed for chronic experiments. We now turn to the relations of production—that is, to the physiology of the lab, the way that it functioned to generate knowledge claims and other products that launched Pavlov onto the world stage.