Pavlov pursued his quest within a lab enterprise that expanded steadily from 1904 to 1914 as his prestige after receiving the Nobel Prize attracted a growing stream of coworkers. That prestige, combined with his institutional clout, enabled him also to substantially expand his research facilities. He retooled his physiology factory for research on conditional reflexes and adapted his managerial techniques to its expanded size and to the new, more knowledgeable coworkers who now often labored there, but its operating principles remained unchanged. So comfortable was Pavlov with this system that he rarely (if ever) attempted with his own hands to establish a CR in a dog.1
In 1905 his cramped quarters at the Military-Medical Academy were replaced by a two-story facility complete with a surgical facility, experimental rooms, a lecture hall, and even a vivarium.2 Two experienced assistants, Babkin and Boldyrev, now lectured at the Academy. The chief was interested solely in CRs, and he now accepted new investigators only if they were willing to work on that subject.3 Within a few years, the workforce at his Academy lab included three full-time personnel (Pavlov, a dissector, and a full-time assistant), eight or ten coworkers each year—including the first female coworkers—and some medical students attracted by Pavlov’s lectures and reputation.4 Pavlov relied largely upon his paid staff to monitor work in this new lab, but also changed his earlier routine in order to leave his main lab at the IEM in late afternoon to drop by the Academy.
He acquired a third lab in 1907 with his election to the elite Academy of Sciences. When a delegation of academicians first proposed to nominate him, he had responded with tactical hesitation. This appointment, he demurred, “would not be advantageous for me either in a scientific or material way.” Having earlier expressed displeasure to Serafima about insufficient recognition by Russia’s scientific establishment, he was of course delighted by the overture—but was now negotiating over terms. The Academy’s lab of Physiology and Comparative Anatomy was very small and ill suited for Pavlov’s purposes. By statute, to become an academician he would have to surrender his position at the Military-Medical Academy, where he had a comparable salary and a larger lab.
Once assured by academicians Famintsyn and Borodin that this requirement could be waived, he raised two more objections: he disapproved in principle of people accumulating paid positions without doing any additional work, and he feared that—stretched between three institutions—he would not make good use of a third lab. Borodin pointed out that were Pavlov to accept this new position, he would have the right in two or three years to choose a talented young physiologist as his adjunct there. Pavlov could also, if he wanted, refuse to accept his salary. Pavlov knew just the person he wanted to appoint—Georgii Zelenyi, a coworker of “great intelligence” who wanted to leave medical practice for a career in physiology. He consented, then, to put his name up for election to the Academy of Sciences on the condition that he could appoint Zelenyi as a second lab assistant to be paid by Pavlov’s salary until Zelenyi received a permanent paid position there.5
On September 8, 1907, the botanists Borodin and Famintsyn joined the zoologists Zalenskii and Nasonov in formally presenting Pavlov’s candidacy to the Academy’s Physico-Mathematical division. Summarizing the nominee’s most important works on digestion, the clinical and theoretical significance of his research, and, of course, citing his Nobel Prize, they noted that he was currently following up on his discovery that “digestion and the secretion of the digestive glands occur under the influence of psychic conditions.” (Like the Nobel Prize committee, they thought that Pavlov was further psychologizing the physiological process of salivation rather than physiologizing the psyche.) The Physico-Mathematical division endorsed Pavlov by a vote of 16 to 0, and the general membership followed suit by a vote of 29 to 3.6
He began immediately to convert the Academy’s small lab into a serviceable facility, requesting a “significant laboratory budget” to purchase, shelter, and feed some dogs, and then another 7,000 rubles to build a permanent kennel. Savich served as his official assistant and Zelenyi as an officially unpaid one until, as planned, he was appointed junior physiologist at the Academy in 1912.7 (In the interim, Pavlov—as good as his word—passed his academician’s salary to Zelenyi. When Zelenyi was promoted to junior physiologist, Pavlov used his own salary to pay another unofficial assistant, Sergei Chakhotin.) Yet in the years before World War I, this small lab—located on the university grounds, with a maximum of two or three experimenters beyond its paid staff—was barely on Pavlov’s radar. His daughter Vera, however, worked there in 1911 and occasionally in later years.
His central research facility remained the IEM. Here Ganike served permanently as assistant; a succession of other senior coworkers served as second assistant. Smirnov remained as “member coworker,” and the engineer, Gerasimov, who was paid from the profits of the gastric juice factory, became a permanent fixture. Pavlov assigned foreign visitors to CR research here as well—for example, the Japanese physician-scientists Ishikawa and Satake, who worked side by side in 1912. The number of coworkers hovered around sixteen annually, limited mostly now by the availability of space.8
It was here, at the IEM, that Pavlov envisioned the greatest expansion of his facilities, the construction of a new lab building that would become famous as the Towers of Silence. The Towers would house eight additional experimental rooms—chambers of a new type designed to give the experimenter complete control over the dog’s sensory experience.
Summarizing the achievements of CR research in a lively speech on “Natural Science and the Brain” to a packed room at the Congress of Naturalists and Physicians in Moscow in December 1909, Pavlov noted: “The investigator who ventures to register the entire influence of the environment on the animal organism requires completely unique research equipment. He must hold all external influences in his own hands. This is why these investigations demand a completely unique laboratory of a type that does not now exist—where there are no accidental sounds, sudden fluctuations in light, sudden drafts of air, and so forth; where, in short, there is the greatest possible constancy.” This new lab also required apparatuses for the precise and measurable excitation of the animal in various ways. Differentiation experiments had demonstrated the extreme sensitivity of the dog’s analyzers to even slight variations in the speed of a metronome and to sounds not discernible by the human ear. Bitter experience had shown that “an unexpected vibration of the building or a noise from the street” could disrupt the most painstakingly prepared trial. Research on higher nervous activity, then, required an unprecedented level of control over the experimental setting: “Here, truly, there must proceed a competition between contemporary techniques of physical instrumentation and the perfection of the animal analyzers.”9 He ended this speech with an appeal to Russian pride and Moscow’s special entrepreneurial energy.
He had probably already made contact with the organization—a product of booming Russian capitalism—that would finance his Towers of Silence. The Kh. S. Ledentsov Society for the Development of Experimental Sciences and Their Practical Applications was a new phenomenon in Russian life: a scientific society sustained entirely by private funds that awarded grants through a nongovernmental process. Like the privately funded Shaniavskii University in Moscow and Lesgaft Courses in St. Petersburg, the Ledentsov Society reflected the growing wealth and civic-mindedness of Russia’s bourgeoisie by the first decade of the twentieth century, and the emergence of an alternative to the state’s monopoly over the patronage of scholars. Founded just nine months earlier, in March 1909, with a two-million-ruble bequest from a Moscow merchant, the society enjoyed institutional relations with two state institutions—Moscow University and the Imperial Moscow Technical School—but itself decided how best to facilitate the development and practical application of Russian science and technology. Shortly after returning to St. Petersburg, Pavlov sent the society a copy of his speech and a brief inquiry about its willingness to finance “the creation in our country of a new type of laboratory for the study of the brain.”10
By May 1910, the Society had approved Pavlov’s plan for a new building adjacent to his existing lab at the IEM. It offered a total of 50,000 rubles in three installments, beginning in October 1910 with 1,000 rubles to subsidize a competition among architects to design the building (the winner was the eminent A. A. Poleshchuk).
In December 1910, Pavlov returned to Moscow to address a celebratory meeting of the society’s benefactors on “The Tasks and Structure of a Contemporary Laboratory for the Study of the Normal Activity of the Highest Division of the Central Nervous System in Higher Animals.” Explaining the purpose of his new lab, he provided a succinct, comprehensible, and exciting view of the present state and future prospects of his research.
His discussion of the need for qualitatively greater control over the experimental setting also revealed the lab experiences that were fueling his increasing interest in hypnosis and sleep. Even lively dogs often fell asleep on the experimental stand—an intriguing phenomenon that made combating the “sleep reflex” important to experimental practice. “If ordinary sleep is an inhibition of the entire activity of the higher parts of the brain,” he surmised, “then hypnotism must be a partial inhibition only of its various divisions.”
His explanation of the mechanism by which an unforeseen stimulus spoiled experiments also reflected the growing complexity of his model of higher nervous processes. For example, if a dog had a conditional reflex (CR) to the sound of a harmonium tone and, while that harmonium was sounding, the dog was also subjected to a neutral stimulus (say, the sound of a carriage passing by on Lopukhinskaia Street), the animal failed to salivate. This, in Pavlov’s lexicon, was “external inhibition” (inhibition of a CR from outside its reflex arc, through the attraction of the excitatory impulse from the conditional stimulus to the point in the brain that had been excited by the neutral stimulus). If the tone itself (the CS) was repeatedly sounded without feeding the dog, it gradually lost its ability to elicit salivation—this was “internal inhibition” (inhibition of a CR from within its reflex arc, through modification of the significance of the CS). If this same dog was then subjected to the tone along with a second, neutral stimulus (say, the flashing of an electrical lamp)—then the dog did salivate. This was an example of “disinhibition”: “One can understand this only this way: the flash of the lamp inhibited, removed, the internal inhibition, and so disinhibited, restored the conditional reflex.”11 Whether or not Pavlov’s listeners followed this reasoning, they could understand his basic point about the extreme sensitivity of experiments on CRs to the slightest environmental stimulus—and so the need for unprecedented control over experimental conditions.
He concluded by hailing the Ledentsov Society as a reflection of new, pragmatic agents supporting the development of Russian science. “Humanity is increasingly permeated by an active faith in the power of the mind armed with its special agent—experiment. The Ledentsov Society clearly is the product of this new wave, the highest which has ever arisen—this wave of general human interest (and not only a Platonic interest) in the experimental sciences and their applications to life, a wave that is making its way through the entire cultured world.”12
The IEM, however, was a state institution, so before Pavlov could build his Towers of Silence there were the usual bureaucratic issues to negotiate. The Ministry of Internal Affairs insisted that Poleshchuk revise his plans and lower his costs, and Prince Ol’denburgskii required Prime Minister Stolypin’s permission to accept the private society’s grant.13 There was also one delicate matter of Institute politics: Pavlov wanted to build the Towers of Silence on a bit of picturesque greenery between the physiology and chemistry buildings, and some colleagues objected that this would spoil the view. Irritated, he petitioned the prince:
Forgive my boldness in disturbing you yet again with the question of my new laboratory. I make bold to ask Your Excellency to leave it at the originally designated place, next to my present laboratory. If built [instead] near the pond, it will cost more money than we have and can obtain anywhere; that is, it will not be built at all.... I cannot conceal my resentment that much of the beauty of the Institute grounds...was sacrificed for a non-Institute structure from which, it seems, not much use has resulted, but regarding my lab they complain about the lawn. Finally, let me say this: the Institute should take pride not in its lawns and appearance, but in its scientific institutions. And I guarantee, Your Excellency, with all my conviction, that the projected laboratory...will add not a little to the scientific reputation of your Institute.14
As usual in his appeals to the prince, Pavlov prevailed. Construction of his new building began in late June 1912. Ganike had by that time already left for Holland to study the techniques devised by Hendrik Zwaardemaker, an expert on acoustical and olfactory physiology, for constructing soundproof rooms.
The builders originally promised to complete the project by October 1912, but one delay followed another, and the basic structure was completed only on the eve of the World War. In October 1917—by which time the war had virtually halted Pavlov’s research and the tsar was held prisoner by Russia’s Provisional Government—Pavlov turned to the Ledentsov Society for additional funds. In a letter to Muscovite physicist Petr Lazarev, he described with excitement and frustration the near-completed state of his new lab:
It is a three-story building on a square plaza surrounded by a deep ditch to eliminate the transmission to its walls of soil vibrations due to the passing of carriages, carts, and automobiles. Inside, it is divided by a cross-like corridor, which thus gives each separate floor four isolated rooms. On two opposite sides...are half towers, each having an exit to the courtyard and stairs leading to all the floors. In this way, entrance to each room is isolated. The second floor serves as a divider between the upper and lower ones, so there are a total of eight experimental rooms in the building. The middle floor and cross-like corridor contain the central apparatuses, which are connected to the experimental rooms by various wires. The windows, doors, and walls of the building have various properties serving the goal of the greatest possible isolation of the experimental rooms from sounds from without. In a corner of each isolated room is an internal chamber, constructed of soundproof material, for the experimental animal. Observation of the animal, registration of its activity and of every action upon it, is conducted by the experimenter from the outside room through all kinds of apparatuses.15
The war and insufficient funds, however, had prevented the completion and equipping of this splendid facility. Would Lazarev please use his influence to extract additional funds from the Ledentsov Society? Lazarev did so, but Pavlov’s thank-you note was written more than two months after the Bolshevik seizure of power. Russian science was again dependent upon a single patron—the state; and Pavlov would need to come to terms with his country’s Bolshevik rulers to complete his Towers of Silence. He would accomplish that only eight very long years later, in 1925.16
In the meantime, Pavlov conferred with Ganike about ways to minimize the influence of uncontrolled stimuli upon experiments. In the earliest years of CR research, the experimenter sat in the room with the dog. This required great patience and self-control, for any sound or movement might spoil the experiment by eliciting “an orienting reflex” and “external inhibition” or by itself becoming a CS or CI. Furthermore, as Babkin recalled, “it was difficult to ensure that nobody entered the room and spoiled the experiment. Pavlov himself was the greatest offender in this respect, for sometimes he could not wait to learn how the experiment was progressing.” Ganike therefore devised a special signal box over each door that the experimenter could control from inside the room. A white light permitted entrance to any interested party, a green light permitted only Pavlov, and a red light forbade entrance altogether. This, however, helped little—experimenters often forgot to change the signal and an impatient Pavlov often entered the chamber if he thought the red light had shone for too long. More than one human factor was at work here, as Babkin explained:
Aside from the desire to know what was going on, I surmise that Pavlov sometimes wanted to check up on the doctor to see whether he was working or sleeping. He told us that once, during the research on digestion, which was also conducted in separate rooms, often behind closed doors, he entered the room of one doctor unexpectedly and found him and his dog both fast asleep! The quietness and monotony of the work on conditioned reflexes was even more conducive to drowsiness. The only action consisted in pressing a bulb, which set up some stimulus, visual, auditory, or tactile, every ten or fifteen minutes and writing down the number of drops of saliva secreted in half a minute, then reinforcing them by giving the dog a little meat-and-bread powder when it responded to the stimulation, and again becoming enveloped in silence. It was impossible to read or do anything else, since an interruption of this act then became a conditioned stimulus in itself and might completely obscure the effects of the special stimulation. In this respect the original experimental technique of conditioned reflexes, employed by the workers up to the time when the later improvements were introduced, was very difficult to carry out and required great endurance.17
Pavlov had good reason to worry that an unscrupulous coworker might take advantage of the privacy in the experimental room. On at least one occasion—or so lab lore had it—he discovered that a coworker had kept his red light shining for days in order to avoid supervision while engaging in more pleasurable activities in the city.18
In the early 1910s, Ganike devised a mechanism that allowed the experimenter to sit outside the room, observing the dog through a small window in the door and delivering visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli by squeezing a series of rubber bulbs. Yet, despite the ingenuity and efficacy of such devices—and of the even more sophisticated instrumentation eventually installed in the Towers of Silence—both the human factor and the unforeseen responses of the dogs to the experimental setting would continually introduce uncontrolled variables into the research.
Pavlov’s physiology factory remained basically the same as in earlier years, but several factors combined to produce subtle changes. For one thing, his enlarged workforce and expanded facilities rendered it impossible for him to closely monitor all experiments at the bench, compelling him to adjust his managerial style. For another, an increasing number of experimenters rose considerably beyond the status of “skilled hands” by virtue of their longer tenure, career goals, and knowledge about the research. Babkin, Boldyrev, Orbeli, Savich, and Zelenyi were present at the birth of CR research and, as members of the paid staff, remained with the chief for many years. Other aspiring physiologists often proved more thoughtful and attached to their own ideas than did physicians who were just passing through with an eye toward a quick doctoral degree and a return to full-time medical practice. The presence of these other experts in CR research (along with the complexity of the scientific issues) produced more ongoing disagreements and alternative interpretations than during the earlier research on digestion. Confined, of course, within the general parameters of Pavlov’s basic view, these concerned such issues as: What is the nature of inhibition, and what is its relationship to excitation? What is the relationship between internal and external inhibition? Does sleep result from internal or external inhibition? By what paths do nervous impulses irradiate through the brain? Can any US renew an extinguished CR? Pavlov also permitted his coworkers to express in the introduction to their doctoral theses philosophical views with which he disagreed. Some expressed Kantian and Machist interpretations of the relationship between physiological and psychological phenomena.19
As in earlier years, the chief continued, as Orbeli put it, to “literally live in the lab.”20 He spent most of his workday at the IEM, but also traveled to the Military-Medical Academy to lecture three mornings each week and to supervise research there in the late afternoon; much less frequently, he dropped by his small facility at the Academy of Sciences. The great majority of his coworkers remained physicians inexperienced in experimental research, and, as Pavlov explained, “their work can pretend to scientific value only if the experiments are conducted under the constant guidance and control of the laboratory chief, who then edits the description of experiments. My entire scientific laboratory activity consists in just this: that, for 7–8 hours daily, I go from one worker to another and participate first in one and then in another experiment.”21 Yet with so many coworkers at three institutions, it was physically possible closely to supervise only a relative few, so he relied upon his assistants to monitor the others. Orbeli did so at the IEM, and later recalled that Pavlov demanded that his assistants “devote all their time to the service of the laboratory” at the expense of their own research and personal lives. So, although he greatly admired the chief, “these years [as Pavlov’s assistant] were very difficult for me.”22
Pavlov spent the mornings watching experiments (often, excited or agitated, talking to himself audibly), and then retired to his study on the second floor of his IEM lab to contemplate what he had seen. He would descend at noon holding a cup of tea and joining his coworkers for a thirty-minute break that usually turned into a discussion session. He often shared a new idea, which he would first express tentatively: “Look at what ideas can sometimes come to a person.” He was thinking aloud, and he encouraged coworkers to respond critically to his brainstorm. Some days later, he would return to that idea—now more clearly formulated—and this time would be in “fighting form, with a clear idea and systematic understanding of the new phenomenon.” Coworkers now disagreed with him at their peril: “He flew upon anybody in disagreement, buried him under a series of arguments and facts, and might scream and scold.... If he was firmly convinced of the truth of an idea, then he considered every objection to be thoughtlessness. In his attacks upon an opponent he employed the entire arsenal of the oratorical art: logic, ridicule, sarcasm, scorn—everything necessary to demolish the opponent, whose arguments he didn’t even want to hear out.” The author of these recollections, Nikolai Rozhanskii, defended Pavlov, however, against “the impression of one-sided impatience” these displays created. The chief had, after all, earlier considered all objections to his new idea and had rejected them in his own mind. He was now impatient to test that idea experimentally, and the doubter only “inhibited the process of implementation.”23
His collaborators’ memoirs from these years consistently refer to Pavlov’s energy, passion, and intensity, his phenomenal memory and his explosive temper. He “suffered greatly over each failure,” recalled one coworker, “especially if it occurred due to carelessness or inattentiveness,” in which case he “pounced furiously upon the guilty party.”24 Zavadskii recalled that frequent “unpleasant skirmishes with Pavlov” were a feature of lab life, and “sometimes his sharp words were neither justified nor explicable by the real conditions of their use.” Afterward, he would often return, chastened, to the common room and “explain that the worker he had terrified was completely right, that the lab should consider his opinion and must implement his suggestion.” For some coworkers, Pavlov’s intensity had its rewards: if he liked an idea, and especially if it received experimental confirmation, this “would transport Ivan Petrovich into such ecstasy that for several days all his acquaintances had to listen to his fervent dithyrambs about the brilliance of the coworker, and this unknown, modest, and unsophisticated provincial would become the hero of the day.”25
Rozhanskii exemplified the new type of coworker who appeared in Pavlov’s labs in the last decade before World War I. A graduate of Kiev University’s medical school, he was inspired by Pavlov’s 1909 speech on “Natural Science and the Brain”: “For me, personally, his report revealed a new world. I saw the power of human thought in the discovery of nature’s secrets.” Approaching Pavlov after the talk, Rozhanskii confessed his ambition to become a physiologist and asked if he could join his lab.
He arrived two weeks later to a warm reception. “I subsequently witnessed more than once how happy Pavlov was at the prospect of attracting to the work a new coworker, especially if he came not merely to write a dissertation for an academic degree, as did many, but wishing to become his student and a permanent coworker.”26 For about a month, Rozhanskii was socialized into lab culture and procedures, and he also watched Pavlov demonstrate various operations on the digestive tract for the visiting Belgian physiologist Vandeput. Like every witness to Pavlov’s surgical prowess, he was most impressed: “It was extremely interesting to observe how Pavlov changed during an operation: his expansiveness and broad gestures disappeared—everything was consumed by the task at hand, he became pedantically concentrated, giving himself up entirely to the course of the operation. He considered most important the accomplishment of a bloodless operation, and achieved this with rare skill, especially in such difficult cases as brain operations.”27
Rozhanskii was no doubt describing his own experience when he sketched the stages that a new coworker traversed in his or her reaction to Pavlov. “Initially, awkwardness in the presence of a famous scientist. Then, disillusionment: the academician, Nobel laureate, and member of all the world’s scientific societies turned out to be so simple and accessible; and the work he directed seemed so simple, that it seemed as if one needed no knowledge to perform it—any good attendant could do so. Then, joy from the results acquired through the work and an understanding of it through Pavlov’s attention and support. Finally, unforgettable admiration.”28
He also gained ample experience with the chief’s famous temper, which he came to regard as an unimportant emotional tic. “I more than once experienced his sharp outbursts, but never noticed even a sign of an attempt to change my views other than by arguments of a logical, scientific character.” For some coworkers, of course, Pavlov’s initial outbursts were themselves sufficient reason to surrender an opposing point of view, but Rozhanskii more than once persevered with good result.29 He was also one of several coworkers of the time who included in his doctoral thesis Kantian and/or Machian philosophical views with which the chief heartily disagreed—but “his attitude toward me did not change.” Rozhanskii defended his thesis in 1913 and went on to a successful career in physiology.
Coworkers had varying experiences with Pavlov’s temper and his unpredictable response to disagreement. Many, no doubt, learned to keep their views to themselves. Gleb Anrep, who worked in the lab as a medical student and then as assistant, found Pavlov “frequently intolerant and always extremely exacting in relation to others and even more so to himself. He had the greatest contempt for anything bordering on slackness or negligence and did not spare the feelings of people in telling them so.” Like Rozhanskii, he found the chief’s outbursts extraordinary, but short-lived—and learned to wait them out. “He would be in a blazing fury to-day, to-morrow he would forget all about it and would be genuinely hurt if one reminded him of it.”30 Two of the chief’s most devoted and intellectually independent associates, Babkin and Orbeli, learned to survive the chief’s temper and to function within the parameters of his strongly held views—but they eventually concluded that to develop as independent thinkers they needed to escape his lab altogether.
Pavlov’s favorite coworker at this time was Nikolai Krasnogorskii. Experienced in CR research before he worked with Pavlov, Krasnogorskii was self-confident, skilled, and intellectually and professionally ambitious. Passing through the lab in two years, he became the chief’s lifelong colleague and one of relatively few coworkers to enjoy a friendly relationship with him outside work. By the time he completed his medical studies at the Military-Medical Academy in 1908, Krasnogorskii had published two articles on CRs in children. Working in Prince Ol’denburgskii’s pediatric hospital, he demonstrated that several basic phenomena that Pavlov and his coworkers had established with dogs—the formation and extinction of CRs, including trace reflexes—obtained also in six-year-old children.31 When he presented this research to the Society of Russian Physicians, Pavlov complimented him highly and observed that, by demonstrating the continuity between higher nervous activity in dogs and humans, it constituted an important step toward his own overarching goal. Once this continuity was fully established, he wrote, “the time will come to compare the phenomena of the internal and external worlds.”32
After entering the Academy’s graduate Institute in 1911, Krasnogorskii initially conducted his doctoral research in Pavlov’s lab there, but the chief became so engrossed in his progress that he moved him to the IEM lab. “He sat through [Krasnogorskii’s] experiments by the hour and thought and spoke exclusively of them,” Babkin observed.33
This research had a profound influence upon Pavlov’s model of higher nervous processes by raising inhibition to fully equal status with excitation. Specifically, Krasnogorskii demonstrated that inhibition irradiated and concentrated in the very same way as did excitation. The standard form of experiment was this: First, he fastened a homemade mechanism called a kololka to different points on his dog’s leg. The kololka consisted of a hard rubber balloon plugged at its open end with a retractable cork. Through the cork protruded sharp needles. This mechanism was attached to the dog’s thigh with the needles pointed at its body; when the experimenter inflated the balloon, the needle-laden cork was thrust at the dog. In Krasnogorskii’s experiments, this apparatus was fastened on the dog’s thigh in a manner that pointed the needles at its paw, at a second point three centimeters above the paw, and at a third point twenty-two centimeters farther above. Differentiation was then accomplished: he repeatedly prodded the dog with the first needle without reinforcing this stimulus with food. According to Pavlov’s theory, then, pokes to this spot became a CI. Jabs at the two higher points were accompanied by feeding and so became a CS—eliciting, say, six drops of saliva. He was now prepared to study the irradiation of the inhibitory impulse. Stimulating the paw (the CI), he received zero drops. He then stimulated the point just above it, and then the point above that. These CSs now elicited less than their normal six drops of saliva, testifying to the irradiation of the inhibitory impulse generated by applying the kololka to the paw. By varying the time interval between tests of the three different spots, Krasnogorskii (and Pavlov) sought to establish the velocity and boundary of the spreading inhibitory wave—and also the rate at which it contracted (or, in Pavlov’s lexicon, concentrated).34
Drawing upon this research in a speech of 1912, Pavlov emphasized that inhibition was not merely an obstacle to excitation—a blockage at the synapse, for example, as it was for the leading British physiologist Charles Sherrington—but was a full-fledged nervous process in its own right. “Nervous activity in general consists of the phenomena of excitation and inhibition. These are, so to speak, its two halves. I shall not, perhaps, make a great error if I permit myself to say that this resembles positive and negative electricity.”35 The relationship of these two fundamental processes became central to lab investigations.
Pavlov took special pride in the fact that this “outstanding person” was Russian. When Krasnogorskii was being considered in 1915 for appointment as lecturer at the Academy, several faculty members objected that he was arrogant. The chief rose to his defense: “There have passed through my laboratory many Russian workers and several foreigners of various nationalities and I do not exaggerate by saying that Doctor Krasnogorskii is perhaps the best of all of them. To work with him is for me a great pleasure.... Yes, he is fervent, very enthusiastic, perhaps a bit self-assured—but, you know, these are natural features of youth and strength. For a Russian heart, it is truly pleasant to meet such a talented man as Doctor Krasnogorskii.” (Clearly, by “Russian” Pavlov meant that Krasnogorskii was neither a foreigner nor a Jew, as were many of his coworkers.) He also used his influence to help Krasnogorskii obtain a coveted two-year grant to study abroad, fiercely defending him against real and imagined foes. Shortly thereafter, Krasnogorskii was appointed professor at the Women’s Medical Institute, which proved the beginning of an illustrious career during which he cooperated with Pavlov as a colleague and friend, and independently extended the Pavlovian doctrine through research on children.36
Pavlov’s lab operation during imperial Russia’s last decade, then, was larger and more productive than ever before. His coworkers now often filled the sessions of the Society of Russian Physicians with their reports, and the chief, as in earlier years, rose regularly at meetings to explain the broader significance of their experiments. Society physicians, however, did not share the same enthusiasm for CR research as they had for Pavlov’s studies of digestion. Babkin observed that “Their attitude was that it was their duty out of respect for Pavlov to listen to these quasi-scientific papers, which were basically of little worth.” This was not the sentiment of clinicians alone. Alexander Maksimov, professor of histology at the Military-Medical Academy and corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, once remarked openly after a meeting filled with such reports that “Somebody is scratched for some unknown reason. It is simply a waste of time to go to these meetings!” When Babkin put his digestive research aside to write a thesis on CRs, his colleagues teased him about his “spitting subject.” Savich described the general opinion of CRs this way: “What kind of science is this? Every hunter has long known about this dog training.”37 This attitude was perhaps one reason that Pavlov was defeated when he ran for re-election as president of the Society in 1912.
In sharp contrast to his practice when working earlier on digestion, Pavlov was extremely cautious about publishing research on CRs in the West. Westerners had access to only three sources of information in languages other than Russian: Pavlov’s speeches at international conferences, a few highly specialized articles in Compte rendu des séances de la Société de Biologie, and some of the lab’s doctoral theses. The last appeared in the French-language edition of the IEM’s house journal, Archives des sciences experimentales, but without the historical and theoretical introductions that explained the significance of the thesis to the lab’s lines of investigation. Archives was not widely read in the West, but, in any case, without such explanations, the thesis extracts published in it—full of data and a bewildering vocabulary—would have meant little to even an interested reader. Subject to continual profound doubts—and aware of the many open questions in this research—Pavlov was clearly reluctant to risk his reputation in the West by offering any high-profile and systematic presentation.
Western interest in Pavlov’s research was piqued in select circles, however, by his speeches—usually delivered in grammatical but poorly pronounced German—on various occasions: to the International Medical Congress in Madrid (1903), at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm (1904), in his speech honoring T. H. Huxley at the Charing Cross Medical School in London (1906), and in his report to the International Physiology Congress of 1913 in Holland. A number of these were published in Western languages.
The anonymous translation of Pavlov’s speech honoring Huxley proved fatefully incompetent. “Specially translated for The Lancet,” it established what proved a durable tradition of mistranslating the terms uslovnyi and bezuslovnyi refleks as “conditioned” and “unconditioned” reflex. The word zvonok (buzzer) was mistranslated as “bell,” and, for good measure, the editors botched the identification of Pavlov, whom they appointed “Professor of Physiology in the University of St. Petersburg.”38
Lancet’s translation caught the attention of Robert Yerkes, professor of psychology at Harvard University, who wrote to Pavlov in November 1908 requesting reprints of “the studies (more or less psychological) on animal reactions” that he had mentioned in his Huxley lecture. Pavlov responded quickly with a list of references and a query: did Yerkes want Russian-language publications as well? He most certainly did: “I am deeply interested in your splendid method and the important results which it is yielding,” and had enlisted the aid of a Russian zoology student, Sergius Morgulis. With Pavlov’s permission, Yerkes and Morgulis planned “to prepare for publication in English a brief discussion of your method and a digest” of representative publications. In a letter of March 1909, Yerkes also urged Pavlov to write a book about his research, offering to have it translated and to serve as its editor for publication in his Animal Behavior Series. “The fact that so much of the special research has been published only in Russian has prevented even those of us who are most interested in it from getting an adequate knowledge.” Two weeks later, having reviewed with Morgulis’s help the materials Pavlov had sent, Yerkes repeated his offer: “I am deeply troubled by my inability to read Russian! And more than ever hope that you will consent to publish a book on this subject in English. It certainly would be a great service to physiology and animal psychology.” By May, Yerkes and Morgulis had completed “The Method of Pawlow in Animal Psychology,” which appeared in The Psychological Bulletin that year—and Yerkes had implanted a salivary fistula in a lab dog “for the purpose of observing some of the reactions about which I have read.”39
This first English-language review of Pavlov’s research provided a bibliography of his lab’s published works, a summary of Orbeli’s and Zelenyi’s doctoral theses (on the dog’s ability to distinguish among colors and sounds, respectively), and a précis of Pavlov’s methodology and goals. Here Yerkes explained that Pavlov was concerned not with “the study of psychic phenomena,” but only with “the physiology of the nervous system.” Yerkes had not read Pavlov’s speeches in Madrid and Stockholm, which might have disabused him of that view. His characterization of Pavlov’s goal, rather, was based upon Pavlov’s introduction to his 1906 speech in honor of T. H. Huxley (and he apparently discarded Pavlov’s contrary conclusion to that same speech as empty rhetoric).
Morgulis’s command of Russian and English was more than sufficient to correctly translate the terms uslovnyi and bezuslovnyi, but, as the authors explained in a footnote, they felt bound by the precedent established in Lancet: “Conditioned and unconditioned are the terms used in the only discussion of this subject by Pawlow which has appeared in English. The Russian terms, however, have as their English equivalents conditional and unconditional. But as it seems highly probable that Professor Pawlow sanctioned the terms conditioned and unconditioned, which appear in the Huxley Lecture (Lancet, 1906), we shall use them.” It is, in fact, extremely unlikely that Pavlov reviewed the Lancet translation (the author of which I have been unable to determine); and even if he had, his minimal knowledge of English would have made him a poor judge.
Yerkes’s deference to the anonymous translator sanctified the mistranslation as a scientific convention. Over the next decade, many scientists, most important the behaviorist John Watson, referred routinely to “conditioned” and “unconditioned” reflexes”—terms that resonated with the behaviorist appropriation of Pavlov—and these were picked up by the popular press. By the early 1920s, when W. Horsley Gantt, who had worked for years in Pavlov’s lab, translated the chief’s collection of speeches and articles into English, he, like Morgulis, noted in a footnote that this rendering was incorrect...but also bowed to precedent.40
Pavlov’s growing contacts with American scientists still flowed mostly from his earlier digestive research. This mutual interest stimulated the correspondence that began in 1912 with Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon, who would become his trusted and beloved friend. Francis Benedict, director of the Carnegie Institute’s Nutrition Laboratory in Boston, visited Pavlov’s lab in 1907, 1910, and 1913 to study his techniques, and the pair formed a warm collegial relationship. Benedict visited the Pavlov home during each visit, and they corresponded regularly until 1917, sharing publications, photos, and contacts. Benedict also acquired for Pavlov and Ganike a special apparatus for the Towers of Silence. John Kellogg, founder and director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, visited Pavlov in 1907 for three weeks. He returned determined to reorder practices at the Sanitarium according to Pavlovian principles on digestion, and bearing a treasured commemorative photo: “I am going to have the picture enlarged to life size and hung up in my office,” he informed Pavlov, “where all my friends can see the man whom of all physiologists who have lived within the century, the world most delights to honor. If you could possibly understand how many friends you have in America I am sure you would be willing to come over this side of the Atlantic and give them a chance to look at you. I esteem it a great honor to be numbered among your friends.”41
Nor were conditional reflexes on the minds of the Cambridge University students who extended to Pavlov a most memorable greeting during his visit there in 1912 to receive an honorary doctorate. The unexpected turn at the Cambridge ceremony was later described nicely by one witness, the eminent British physiologist A. V. Hill:
The students of the physiology classes had listened to lectures on the physiology of digestion, in which Pavlov’s work was frequently referred to: the experiments appealed to their imagination, and when they heard that Pavlov was coming to get an honorary degree they thought they must do something to celebrate the occasion.
What they did was done as a friendly joke and was appreciated in exactly the right spirit by Pavlov himself. They went to a toyshop and bought a dog as large as they could get, they decorated it, if I remember, with rubber tubes and rubber stoppers and glass tubes, and anything else they could think of, to represent a humorous version of Pavlov’s experiments on digestion; then when he went to the Senate House they took the dog to the gallery and held it between two strings from side to side; as Pavlov walked back from the Vice-Chancellor, having received his honorary degree, they let it down to him from both sides of the gallery into his arms; he received it with astonishment and amusement and carried it away proudly with him to the delight of the students.42
The students’ gesture put Pavlov in lofty company indeed: when Darwin had received his honorary degree at Cambridge in 1877, students had lowered upon him a marionette of a monkey in the same gesture of jocular respect. Pavlov’s toy dog thereafter occupied a place of honor in his study.
Serafima accompanied her husband on that trip and especially enjoyed several moments that provided moral support for her efforts to modify his dismissive attitude toward religion. Their host in London, learning of Pavlov’s interest in astronomy, mentioned that he had two friends who were astronomers, one who said that the more he observed the heavens, the more he was convinced that there was no god, and another who maintained just the opposite. Which should he invite to dinner? Serafima, of course, requested the believer. Pavlov was also surprised when a banquet he attended with his medical colleagues began with a prayer, as did the breakfast he attended with the family of one colleague.
Undoubtedly most satisfying to Serafima, however, was an incident at the celebration of the Royal Society’s 250th anniversary jubilee. This began with a service at Westminster Abbey during which the eminent scientists proved sincerely reverent. As Pavlov later admitted, “When I, as a Russian liberal, conducted myself as we usually conduct ourselves at prayers, I fell into an awkward situation.” Next to him stood William Ramsay, whom Pavlov knew from the Stockholm ceremony of 1904 at which Ramsay had received a Nobel Prize for chemistry. “During the service I, like a typical Russian, distracted him with conversations and did not immediately notice that he was in a reverent mood.” Serafima enjoyed few victories in conflicts with her overbearing and sometimes obstreperous husband, so she no doubt experienced some satisfaction when recording Ramsay’s irritated reaction to his behavior: “In church one prays, one doesn’t converse.”43