Pavlov’s coworkers were exclusively male until the movement for women’s liberation in the late nineteenth century and the revolution of 1905 combined to bring qualified women to his door.
Women’s liberation had been a central feature of the radical movement of the 1860s and 1870s. Russian universities and medical institutions were closed to women, but in the liberal atmosphere of the early 1860s many St. Petersburg women, for example, audited courses at St. Petersburg University and the Medical-Surgical Academy. A decree of 1863 put an end to that, so many young women traveled abroad, often to Switzerland, in pursuit of a higher education. These Russian women, like generations to follow, were especially attracted to the study of medicine. Some 70 percent of the 120 Russian women enrolled in Zurich from 1864 to 1874 were engaged in medical studies. For many, medicine combined the intellectual excitement and prestige of science, the relative independence and security of a career (although the great majority of Russian physicians were state employees of relatively low status), and an opportunity for humanitarian service. In the early 1870s, the state allowed the creation of Higher Women’s Courses and Women’s Medical Institutes in a number of major cities, including St. Petersburg’s Women’s Medical Institute (1872) and the Bestuzhev Courses (1878)—creating opportunities that attracted Serafima Karchevskaia, among many others, to the city.
Much of the ground gained in the 1860s and 1870s was lost in the political reaction that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. The Women’s Medical Institute was shuttered in 1881, so in the 1890s there were very few women who fit the profile of Pavlov’s coworkers. In 1897, however, after more than fifteen years of political and bureaucratic struggles, that Institute was reborn.1 Three members of its first graduating class found their way to Pavlov’s lab.
Prior to 1905, Pavlov had collaborated with only one woman, his colleague and friend Ekaterina Shumova-Simanovskaia, who was one of the first Russian women to successfully negotiate the difficult path to a career in science and medicine. She lent critical chemical expertise to their joint research of the late 1880s on gastric secretion—research that contributed a number of the fundamental insights upon which Pavlov built his Nobel Prize–winning work in the 1890s—and subsequently became a member of Nencki’s chemistry division at the IEM.
Despite Shumova-Simanovskaia’s important contribution to his research, Pavlov’s first response to the prospect of female collaborators was hardly favorable or even temperate. Orbeli heard loud voices in Pavlov’s office, after which the chief confided: “Devil take it, three female physicians came and asked to work. Well, I of course refused. I cannot! One can’t permit women in the laboratory. I already suffered so much with Shumova-Simanovskaia. Not a day passes without either hysteria or some sort of offence, tears—and I can’t bear a woman’s tears, so I will never allow women into the laboratory.”2
Practical considerations soon changed his mind. The Military-Medical Academy had just completed construction of his new, larger lab there, and Pavlov needed additional coworkers to staff it. “The devil only knows,” he told Orbeli two or three weeks later. “You know, maybe give it a try?” This first trio of women investigators impressed Pavlov sufficiently for him to admit another cohort that banished his reservations forever. “You know, they are not at all bad, and in many ways are even more suitable and work better [than men].”3
Biographical information is available for only two of these three women, Evgeniia Voskoboinikova-Granstrem and Nadezhda Kasherininova. Both were graduates of the Bestuzhev Higher Women’s Courses and the Women’s Medical Institute. Kasherininova, the daughter of a vice admiral, was a member of the Institute’s first class, graduating with distinction in 1902. She then volunteered for service in the Russo-Japanese War, treating patients at a Red Cross hospital in Manchuria. After Russia’s defeat, she returned to St. Petersburg, where she served as clinician and teacher at her alma mater. She became an exemplary coworker, reporting twice to the Society of Russian Physicians in 1906 and defending her doctoral thesis two years later. Voskoboinikova-Granstrem began working in Pavlov’s lab while still a student at the Women’s Medical Institute, from which she graduated with distinction in 1907. Neither she nor the third woman, Vurtsel, ever completed a thesis, but Pavlov considered the research of each, like Kasherininova’s, sufficiently important to cite in his own reports and publications.
Pavlov assigned his female recruits to study what he then referred to as “artificial” conditional reflexes. During the first phase of research, Babkin, for instance, had experimented with the formation, development, and extinction of “natural” CRs—those formed by the association of food or rejected substances with exciters, such as the scent of food or acid, that naturally accompanied these substances. Pavlov had then assigned Boldyrev to begin research on a series of “artificial” CRs—that is, reflexes formed by associating food or a rejected substance with exciters that “in the ordinary course of events have nothing in common with food or the rejected substance.” In various trials Boldyrev sounded a buzzer and exposed the dog to light and cold while simultaneously either feeding the dog or putting acid in its mouth.4 Over time, each of these exciters came to elicit salivation (that is, became a conditional stimulus, a CS). The first female coworkers developed this line of investigation, studying the formation of CRs to the mechanical irritation of various parts of the dog’s body (Kasherininova), the warming of a spot on the dog’s body (Voskoboinikova-Granstrem), and the sight of a moving figure (Vurtsel). In each case, they established that after these exciters were repeatedly paired with feeding, they became a CS.
They also studied the capacities of the dog’s various analyzers through experiments on differentiation. Voskoboinikova-Granstrem established that her dog could differentiate between the cooling of a specific place on its skin at a temperature of 0 centigrade (which she established as a CS) and the cooling of that same spot at 4 degrees. As she made clear in her thesis, this phenomenon of differentiation was clearly applicable to humans as well; it reflected the action of an inhibitory mechanism and lay at the heart of any organism’s purposive response to environmental stimuli. After a number of repetitions, as the dog accumulated “life experience,” the interaction of excitation and inhibition rendered its responses to an exciter increasingly specific and localized. Similarly, she reported, “how frequently we see in children an entire series of nonpurposive movements in response to some exciter, movements that over time, through gradual exercise and the accumulation of life experience, completely disappear.”5
These results were important to Pavlov for two main reasons. First, they reinforced his confidence in the CR methodology for studying the animal psyche. As he put it during a discussion at the Society of Russian Physicians: “Each phenomenon from the external world can become an exciter of the salivary gland. And if this is so, then we can acquire from the salivary gland a reflection of everything from this external world. Clearly, this means that the entire content of the so-called psychic function can here be exhausted by the objective path. The entire dusha can be confined within the known rules of such an objective investigation.”6 (His use of the word dusha, the traditional word for “soul,” reflected the true target of his research; he would later abandon it as he adopted increasingly positivist language.) Second, since “artificial” and “natural” CRs behaved in precisely the same manner, Pavlov could use a wide array of increasingly precise artificial stimuli (such as a buzzer or a metronome) to study this process experimentally. In December 1908, Kasherininova became the first woman to defend a doctoral thesis researched in his lab.
After his experience with these first female coworkers, Pavlov enthusiastically accepted three each year between 1910 and 1912. Eight of the nine were graduates of the Women’s Medical Institute, and each successfully completed her doctoral thesis. Moreover, these women developed a lifelong commitment to scientific research in general and CRs in particular; six collaborated with Pavlov in their postgraduate years, and a seventh worked with another lab alumnus in Kiev.
* * *
In every cohort of coworkers, Pavlov chose a clear favorite or two—sitting for hours beside them at the bench, excitedly informing the lab about their findings, and generally singing their praises. Maria Erofeeva, “a marvelous worker and a very bold, energetic woman” in the words of another investigator, enjoyed the heady experience of becoming Pavlov’s first female favorite, and she soon became infatuated with the chief.7
Erofeeva’s feelings were not reciprocated, but her research captivated Pavlov and preoccupied him for many years, providing important material for his thinking about the fundamental laws governing CRs and their broad significance in the life of animals. Her investigations provided a point of departure for new lines of investigation on the nature of sleep and mental illness, and they exemplify the relationship between experiment and interpretation in Pavlov’s research.
Pavlov assigned Erofeeva to investigate the effect of “destructive stimuli” upon CRs. As so often occurred, this topic emerged from a chance observation: coworkers had often noticed that a dog with an established CR ceased to give that response when it was uncomfortable from the straps that bound it to the stand, when it had been slightly burned by the apparatus that tested its response to heat, or when it suffered from the stomach disorders common among lab dogs. Discomfort, then, seemed to inhibit CRs. In lab terminology, it constituted an “external inhibitor.” As Erofeeva explained in her thesis, the word “pain” was too subjective to have any scientific value; from an objective standpoint, pain was “a signal of destruction”—a message from the nervous system that an organism’s tissues were being damaged. So the objectivist term for pain became “destructive irritation.”8
This phenomenon had been investigated in a child by a German scientist, Heinrich Bogen, who had been inspired by Pavlovian research. He experimented upon a three-year-old boy who suffered a complete blockage of his digestive tract and was being fed through a gastric fistula, which rattled when being prepared for use. Using this patient as an opportunity to study the formation of a CR, Bogen observed that, after forty such feedings, the mere sound of the rattling glass fistula elicited gastric secretion. He then subjected the boy to a painful electrical shock amid the rattling—and the flow of gastric juice ended immediately. As in lab dogs, Erofeeva noted, here “the destructive irritation elicited inhibition of the conditional reflex.” This phenomenon required systematic investigation, so “the esteemed Professor I. P. Pavlov assigned me to study this extremely interesting issue.”9
Erofeeva began her experiments in November 1910 by using the needle-laden kololka to prick the skin of her two dogs, Shalun and Chernukha, thus “inflicting a sharp irritation.” Each dog had previously been employed by other coworkers and so had well-established CRs: Shalun salivated at the sight of meat-and-sugar powder, Chernukha to the scent of camphor. Did this “destructive irritation” in fact inhibit the dogs’ CRs? The results were puzzling. Shalun normally responded to the scent of camphor with eight drops of saliva. After this scent was combined seventy times with a sharp jab from the needles, it elicited only half a drop (and the clearly irritated dog seized the kololka with its teeth in a “defensive response”). The needle jab had indeed inhibited the CR. With repetition, however, Shalun’s salivary response to this combination of stimuli began to climb, finally reaching nine drops. The same proved true with Chernukha.
For Pavlov, these numbers had to mean something about the precise and purposive action of the higher nervous system—but what, exactly? The initial inhibition of these CRs by the needle was clearly the result of external inhibition. But what accounted for the paradoxical rise in salivation during the second phase? The kololka was ill suited for prolonged experimentation to answer this question, since the constant jabbing caused the dog to break out in eczema, after which the experimenter could not control the animal’s discomfort with the necessary precision.
Therefore, in January 1911 Erofeeva replaced the kololka with an apparatus that inflicted precisely controlled electrical shocks on the dogs. This device was operated from the corridor outside the experimental room and covered with cotton batting so the dog would not respond to the sound of its operation. It included a galvanometer to register the flow of current and a switch designed to turn the electricity on and off quietly. The only part of the mechanism brought into the experimental chamber was the cord, which ended in a glass rod containing electrodes. This was inserted in a metallic holder that was fastened to a shaved part of the dog’s left rear thigh.
The results again proved puzzling. Chernukha initially responded to the combination of camphor and electrical shock with a lesser, clearly inhibited salivary response—but “this effect was extremely unstable,” and that combination of exciters sometimes elicited the same amount of salivation as had camphor alone. So, with Pavlov at her side, Erofeeva increased the force of the current, seeking the level of destructive irritation necessary to decisively inhibit Chernukha’s salivary response. As she increased the current, Chernukha’s rate of salivation fluctuated—first decreasing, then, even as Erofeeva increased the current again, rising to a higher level than elicited by the camphor alone. The same proved true with Shalun. How did this pattern reflect the purposive response of the higher nervous system to signals from the animal’s environment?
Pavlov and Erofeeva adopted an intriguing hypothesis: The electrical current—pain, a destructive irritator—had become a CS, an exciter of the salivary glands. That is, through its repeated association with camphor it had become a signal for food—so the higher levels of salivation reflected the summation of two signals for feeding (the camphor and the shock). This explained, for example, the results of one experiment during which Chernukha responded to the scent of camphor with six drops of saliva, to an electrical shock with three drops of saliva, and to the combination of camphor and shock with nine drops of saliva. This astonishing conclusion—that pain could become a CS—led the experimenters to an extended series of trials designed “to study the qualities of this new exciter.”10
The events that followed might well seem to be the merciless torture of two dogs. Pavlov’s worldview and faith in his scientific methodology, however, gave the poor dogs’ salivary patterns larger significance. Thus, the more baffling these patterns became, the more experiments ensued. For him, every drop of saliva reflected the determined response of the higher nervous system (here, to the signaling of food by electrical shock). As one lab publication put it: “We know that conditional reflexes are strictly specific, that only an exciter that has been artificially linked with the excitement of the salivary gland by an unconditional exciter...will itself excite the salivary gland.”11 So the experimenters interpreted the dogs’ every salivary response to electrical shock as a response to the association of shock and food, and analyzed the animals’ fluctuating salivary responses as a reflection of the unseen processes in the brain that governed this association.
Shalun was first. After repeatedly being shocked and then fed, the hungry dog first salivated in response to shock alone with the fourteenth repetition, producing a full drop with the thirtieth. The stronger current used with Chernukha produced quicker and more definitive results: a “fully satisfactory reflex” of four drops. Despite considerable fluctuations in the dogs’ salivary responses, the experimenters concluded after about one month of such trials that they had established a CR to the current.12
They were, then, ready to address another question. In mid-March 1911, Erofeeva and Pavlov (who violated his daily routine to participate in experiments that sometimes continued into the early evening) tested the differentiation of this reflex. That is, did the dogs salivate when electrical shock was applied to other places on their bodies (the neck, forehead, and tail) that had not been reinforced with feeding? The results were inconclusive, Erofeeva explained, because the differing sensitivities of these body parts introduced uncontrollable variables.13 So they temporarily put this question aside to study another, more intriguing one: despite continual reinforcement with feeding, shocks to the dogs’ rear left thigh had ceased to elicit salivation. What might explain this obvious inhibition of an established CR?
This puzzling phenomenon was accompanied by “a sharp change in the behavior of the dogs,” and we have Erofeeva’s description of these poor creatures in late April, after about three months of experimentation:
Chernukha, until then always cheerful in the stand...now, during work with the weak Faradaic current, salivated very noticeably...in response to every kind of stimulation.... Saliva appeared in response to the movements of various people; noise, especially, acted upon the salivary gland—the beating of the clock in the corridor, the passage of a carriage or the noise of a motor on the street; everything excited salivation. Furthermore, the dog gradually lost its liveliness. Having previously stood cheerfully on the stand, its head raised and constantly waving its tail, the dog became unrecognizable. Apathetic on the stand, head and tail hanging low, eyes half closed.
Shalun manifested the same symptoms:
The dog, which had earlier stood in the stand and worked marvelously, became listless; the listlessness passed into drowsiness and, instead of the formerly cheerful dog, we now saw in the stand an apathetic animal with lowered tail and head, eyes half-closed or even entirely shut, saliva trickling from its mouth slowly. At the same time, our working organ—the parotid salivary gland—lost its regularity of work;...salivation appeared with every noise, without any reason that we could notice.... Now and then the dog appeared disturbed, and once there was such a sharp excitation that it crawled from the straps and we had to cease work for the day.14
Perhaps these poor animals were simply torture victims, but for Pavlov and Erofeeva they exhibited a puzzling phenomenon requiring explanation—the disappearance of a CR. The dogs, after all, were not ill, Erofeeva noted, and their salivary glands remained sound. Chernukha, for instance, still responded to the scent of camphor with salivation (so that CR remained intact). The experimental data were inconsistent, the situation “so confused that one could even doubt the very existence of a conditional reflex to irritation with current.” The dogs’ drowsiness on the stand, however, provided what the experimenters perceived as a key clue: the electrical current had become not only a conditional exciter of the salivary gland, but also, after much repetition, a “generalized inhibitor.” That is, it was putting the dogs to sleep. This generalized inhibition—which had its own, poorly understood dynamics—explained the dogs’ fluctuating salivary responses.
Coworkers had frequently noticed that dogs grew drowsy and even dozed during experiments, particularly during trials with mechanical and thermal agents. Two former coworkers had, at Pavlov’s instruction, developed means to combat this “reflex of sleep.” That same reflex also explained why Shalun and Chernukha salivated in response to superfluous exciters such as the ticking of the corridor clock. Sleep could “inhibit an inhibitor”—a process the lab termed “disinhibition”—and so might lead a dog that had developed a specific CR to instead salivate in response to any random exciter.15
Fortified by this hypothesis, Erofeeva and Pavlov employed the means earlier developed to combat the “reflex of sleep” in order to continue their experiments. The dogs were rested during the month of May, and experimental trials were interspersed with excitation by other stimuli to keep them awake (presumably, by exciting other nervous centers). This seemed to work. As Erofeeva continued her experiments in summer 1912 (while Pavlov vacationed in Sillamiagi), the dogs’ salivary response to electrical shock increased, and their behavior also changed markedly. In early July, Erofeeva noted in her protocols that Shalun was “enlivened, wags its tail, turns about” and had ceased salivating between trials or in response to random movements. The dog’s sleepiness disappeared and its reflexive response to shock “turned out to be a good one.” (But here, as was so frequently true with Pavlovian experiments, the phenomenon itself is difficult or impossible to separate from the interpretive practices that defined it. For Erofeeva and Pavlov, a “good” reflexive response to the electrical shock applied to the rear left leg—presumably a response to the signal of feeding—was sometimes as little as one drop of saliva, while larger salivary responses to shocks to other parts of the body—say, of six drops—were often explained away as generalized reactions due to disinhibition. It often required many experimental trials to finally match results with interpretive presuppositions.)16
Erofeeva now returned hopefully to her experiments on the differentiation of this reflex, but the dog’s “energetic state” proved fleeting. Shalun would arrive at the stand enlivened, but once the experiments started would begin to salivate randomly, became listless and drowsy, and even fell asleep. Chernukha, too, proved unfit for work—salivating constantly, short-winded, and clearly uncomfortable in the stand. Erofeeva attributed this to the summer heat and waited for Pavlov’s return in the fall.17
Convinced that they had established the ability to turn electrical shock into a signal for food, the experimenters now tested this association in a new set of trials. They began applying a much stronger current that “elicited an almost unbearably sharp shooting sensation.” (They apparently tested the current once or twice upon themselves or other coworkers.) Shalun and Chernukha initially responded to the stronger current with a “a very sharp defensive reaction” (grabbing the electrodes with their teeth and shrieking), but, as Erofeeva and Pavlov continued to increase the current, these defensive reactions grew weaker and sometimes even disappeared while the magnitude of salivation increased, to eight to nine drops in one dog and ten to eleven in the other.
Fastened to the stand, unable to avoid an unending series of painful shocks, the dogs, we might well conclude, became passive and ceased to resist. Pavlov and Erofeeva analyzed the situation quite differently. For them, the electrical shock was both a destructive irritator and a signal of food. Salivation was a precise, purposive conditional response to that signal, so the increasing level of salivation, together with the dogs’ diminished defensive reactions, indicated that the shock’s quality as a signal of food had acquired primacy over its quality as an inducer of pain. This was especially impressive as these shocks were so severe that they were damaging the animals’ skin.18
Five new dogs were brought in to study the dynamics of this process. The first two grew so sleepy during the trials that they rarely responded to the current by salivating, so they were replaced with three other dogs. In order to test the possibility that dogs simply became accustomed over time to the current, Erofeeva and Pavlov shocked these dogs repeatedly without accompanying the current with food. The animals’ continued defensive reactions—typical was Lisa, who “shrieked loudly and grabbed the electrodes with its teeth, shrieked for the entire duration of the action of the current, and even when it ceased”—disposed of this hypothesis.19
There remained, they believed, only one explanation of the acquired facts: “The food center is of course the most powerful, the most physiologically important; hence it is clear that excitation of this important center can completely suppress the excitation of other, weaker centers and can...attract to itself any excitation.” Upon becoming a signal for food, electrical shocks excited the food center, which attracted to itself excitation that would otherwise have reached the pain center. From this perspective, the often puzzling, fluctuating data reflected the gradualness of this process and the dynamics of “a struggle between two centers—the food center and the [pain] center.” This hypothesis was, Erofeeva wrote, most convincingly demonstrated in the case of one dog whose strong defensive reaction to the electrical current was overcome only by denying it food for an entire day before the experimental trial, teasing it with meat, and finally feeding it just before applying the current. Having previously responded to the current with “stormy defensive reactions,” the dog now merely “glanced about, but did not cease eating.” So, “here, too, the food center was victorious, but this required its strong excitation by preliminary fasting and meat.”20
Pavlov was fascinated by these experiments and excited by their implications. Constantly at Erofeeva’s side, he jotted down thoughts for further experiments in the small pocket notebook that he carried for this purpose. “There is probably no sharp boundary between voluntary and involuntary acts,” he mused. “One can probably make salivation voluntary in relation both to excitation and inhibition.” They had, in his view, inhibited the dogs’ supposedly involuntary response to pain, and had also turned the unconditional destructive irritator into a signal for food. Even the most basic animal responses, then, seemed changeable by experience and manipulation.21
Erofeeva’s results figured prominently in Pavlov’s speech of March 1912 to the Society of Russian Physicians on “The Main Laws of the Activity of the Central Nervous System, As Explicated by the Investigation of Conditional Reflexes,” in which he summarized the main results of a decade of research. Describing her procedures, he informed his audience somewhat ingenuously that “in all animals this experiment succeeds easily.” He explained the results by his theory of the “struggle of centers,” which he rooted in the animal’s needs during the struggle for existence: “Clearly, the food center must be considered the strongest physiological center, and we have the corresponding, completely clear fact that the food center can attract to itself irritations from other centers.”22 This physiological mechanism by which the animal sacrificed part of its body in order to secure food thereafter became a staple of Pavlov’s expositions on the purposiveness of the animal organism.
In August 1912, a few months after Erofeeva completed her thesis, Pavlov made a rare exception to his summer routine, returning to St. Petersburg to host an eminent visitor, the British physiologist Charles Scott Sherrington. Proudly escorting his colleague through his lab at the IEM, the chief had Erofeeva demonstrate some of her more impressive experiments. According to one coworker, while witnessing these Sherrington seemed uncomfortable and “conducted himself a bit strangely,” but according to Pavlov the physiologist fully understood the implications of what he had seen: “When these experiments were shown to Sherrington, England’s leading physiologist, he said ‘Now I understand why the Christian martyrs could withstand torture. Apparently, by a certain concentrated thought one can achieve this—that pain will not exist.’ These are his words, and this is true. If pain had remained, it is impossible to understand, impossible to imagine, how that pain could have been endured.... The Christians endured terrible torture, and did so smiling. Consequently, we must allow that enormous moral excitation inhibited, eliminated, the feeling of pain.”23
A short postscript highlights the interpretive moments in this research: Erofeeva’s findings constituted a great triumph of the first decade of research on CRs and fortified the chief’s faith that he was on the path toward a physiological explanation of the psyche. Yet those results would eventually be reinterpreted and largely discarded. Erofeeva had recorded that two of her dogs became visibly “disturbed” during experimental trials, but she and Pavlov had ignored this. When the lab turned toward investigations of mental illness in the 1920s and 1930s, this result received closer attention. Pavlov collaborated with Maria Petrova on experiments that led them to the conclusion that, while an electrical shock could indeed become a CS, this had occurred in few if any of Erofeeva’s dogs; her two “disturbed” animals had, rather, suffered a “break.” That is, their secretory patterns reflected, not a stable CR to shock, but a mental breakdown. In the early 1930s, Pavlov assigned two coworkers to repeat Erofeeva’s experiments, noted their perplexingly contradictory results, and concluded that “the effect of electrical shock varies enormously, apparently according to the type of nervous system.” Discussing this question in 1935, he confided that, after he and Erofeeva had begun to shock various spots on the dogs’ bodies, the experimental data testifying to the establishment of shock as a signal for food “went entirely to the devil.” As always in Pavlov’s research, interpretation was no less important than the saliva drops themselves.24
* * *
“An interesting episode with Kal’m, that impudent and aggressive pup.”25 Pavlov’s note to himself, probably written in February 1912, referred to a key episode in the research of the most important member of the next cohort of women coworkers to arrive in the lab, Maria Bezbokaia. For Pavlov, Bezbokaia’s experiments, like Erofeeva’s, brought his research considerably closer to recognizably human emotions and behavior.
Born in Kiev, Bezbokaia had earned her medical degree at the University of Lausanne and practiced medicine briefly in Paris before returning to Russia. She served in the campaign against typhus in Kharkov and then in a hospital in Novgorod before moving to St. Petersburg, where she worked in the Princess Elena Pavlovna Clinical Institute. After completing the course work for her doctorate in medicine at Kharkov University and a short stint at the Kiev Bacteriological Institute, she entered Pavlov’s lab in 1911 to work on her doctoral thesis.
Pavlov assigned her to investigate the dynamics of excitation, inhibition, and disinhibition. Her more than 700 experiments on the responses of one dog to various combinations of the beat of a metronome and the jabbing of the kololka yielded uninteresting results. Fortuitously, however, Bezbokaia’s other animal, Kal’m, a black sheepdog “of extremely aggressive type” that attempted constantly to bite her, created unforeseen experimental opportunities when it conceived an especially strong dislike for the chief.
In late February 1912, Pavlov entered Bezbokaia’s experimental chamber while Kal’m was “behaving especially aggressively.” Whether from anger or calculation, he struck the animal several times. “The dog barked even more, thrashing about and straining from the stand. From that moment, the presence of the professor and even [the sound of] his footstep and voice in the corridor elicited an extraordinarily aggressive reaction.” No doubt at Pavlov’s suggestion, they decided to focus further experiments upon the effect of Kal’m’s aggressiveness upon his CRs.26
First, intending to establish a CI against aggression, Pavlov approached Kal’m nonchalantly, holding an electrified rod with a wooden handle. The rod had been painted red to attract the animal. “Flying into a rage, the dog tore the rod from his hands with its teeth—and was burned.” Yet this did not inhibit Kal’m in the least; he continued more than once to seize the rod. “It was astonishing and unexpected that in the intervals between attacks upon the rod, the dog greedily threw itself upon the pieces of toast thrown to it [by Pavlov]—and, after these feedings, barked fiercely and bared its teeth.” For the experimenters, the animal’s rage had become generalized excitation.27
Counting now upon Kal’m’s enraged response to Pavlov’s presence, they tested the influence of this “aggressive reaction” (or “attack reflex”) upon its CRs. Comparing the dog’s behavior and affect with its salivary responses, they concluded that a “weak or moderate degree of aggressive reaction” inhibited the dog’s established CRs (for example, lowering its salivary response to the metronome), but that a “higher level” of rage augmented reflexive responses. Here, for example, is Bezbokaia’s description of an experiment in September 1912. The trial begins when Pavlov enters the room, at which the dog begins to bark.
For Pavlov and Bezbokaia, both Kal’m’s secretory response to the metronome and the voracity with which he seized the food corresponded to the strength of his aggressive response to Pavlov. These results seemed especially significant when compared to those obtained in a trial one month later when the dog behaved more calmly:28
In this second trial, when Kal’m was only moderately enraged—as judged by his movements and barking—this inhibited his salivary responses (a physiological measure of the phenomenon) and the avidity with which he seized the food (the psychological dimension). This contrasted with the first trial, in which the dog’s great fury increased its salivary responses and voraciousness.
Jotting down his thoughts, Pavlov reasoned that, when Kal’m was greatly enraged, “irradiation of excitation from the aggressive center reached the food center, eliminates there the inhibitory side of the conditional inhibitor, freeing its excitatory, always hidden component—and this, joining now with the excitatory conditional reflex, gives a summed effect. Thus, it is increased in comparison with the effect of the conditional reflex alone.” Moderate rage, however, merely diverted some of the excitation from the food center, resulting, like other “external inhibitors,” in a lessened response.29
For Pavlov, as he excitedly informed his coworkers at the time, Bezbokaia’s results constituted an important step toward “the experimental investigation of emotions.” Kal’m’s heightened physiological and psychological responses when enraged explained much about human reactions as well: “How often we see that a person consumed by passion, for example jealousy, blames his unhappiness on an innocent person or even on an inanimate object.”30
Bezbokaia’s dissertation defense soon excited the chief’s own famous temper. Like the great majority of coworkers, she had entered the lab with little knowledge of physiology and much less about the esoteric lexicon and concepts of CR research. Pavlov routinely compensated for this by having coworkers read their thesis draft aloud to him, by offering oral corrections and additions, and then, finally, carefully reading the final text. At each stage he would correct errors, offer interpretations, and help frame the data with discussions of previous investigations. Sometimes, he dictated these sections verbatim.
In Bezbokaia’s case, however, the chief reviewed her thesis only hurriedly. It was her great misfortune that, while she was laboring to complete it in early fall 1912, Pavlov had neither the time nor inclination to supervise any coworker except Maria Petrova (with whom he was completely infatuated). Preoccupied with Petrova’s charms, he accepted the reports and articles of other coworkers after a perfunctory oral reading.31 Thinking that Bezbokaia’s contribution to “the experimental investigation of emotions” sufficed to make her work a significant scientific contribution worthy of a doctoral thesis—and counting on his considerable personal authority to overcome any difficulties—he quickly approved her thesis and submitted it to the Military-Medical Academy. In late October 1912, the faculty assigned a three-person committee—composed of Pavlov, his assistant (and Academy lecturer) Lev Orbeli, and pharmacologist Nikolai Kravkov—to read the thesis and conduct the formal defense.
That thesis was, by any measure, weak. Even one of Pavlov’s devoted disciples admitted that it was “poor in data and rich in misprints.”32 Composed hurriedly by an unseasoned investigator without the customary help of the chief, it also lacked entirely the interpretive discussions of experimental results that usually framed the data in coworkers’ dissertations. As a result, it was also strikingly skimpy: 31 pages of text (compared to the more typical 145, for example, of Erofeeva’s thesis).
As at Russian universities, a doctoral thesis defense at the Military-Medical Academy was a gala public occasion. Graduate students attended in tailcoats, and military physicians and faculty members appeared in full uniform with sword and epaulettes. The three official examiners began the questioning, starting with the most junior—and so, in Bezbokaia’s case, with Orbeli, followed by Kravkov, then Pavlov. These faculty members could press the candidate at length, but once each had concluded he could not resume interrogation later. When the professors were finished, any member of the audience could question the candidate. The examining committee then met and reported to the general faculty assembly, which voted to award or deny the doctoral degree. Failures were very rare. The thesis had, after all, already been approved by the candidate’s director, who was presumably the leading faculty authority on the subject and who was unlikely to risk humiliation by allowing the submission of a conspicuously weak product. In the rare case of failure, the disgrace was compounded by the fact that the 500 copies of the thesis that had been printed before the defense were sent to libraries bearing black letters that read “not worthy of the desired degree.”
By the day of Bezbokaia’s defense on May 2, 1913, Pavlov knew that his candidate was in serious trouble. Having heard ominous rumblings among the faculty, he reportedly told his associates that his enemies were determined to exploit the weaknesses in Bezbokaia’s thesis to embarrass him and discredit his research. His sensitivity was heightened by awareness that many Westerners had gathered in St. Petersburg for the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. He also no doubt felt a bit guilty about the situation in which Bezbokaia found herself, for he must have known that her thesis was relatively weak as a result of his inattentiveness. Coworker Iurii Frolov accompanied Pavlov to the defense and left this description of the chief’s demeanor: “His entire appearance and stride, especially the concentrated features of his face, caught the attention of everybody who encountered us on our route.... When he was indignant, he grew furious, terrible. There were people who, having spoken with Pavlov in the morning, did not have the strength to meet with him that evening, so temperamental was his speech.”33
Bezbokaia’s performance at the defense was by all accounts unimpressive. Finding herself suddenly at the center of a highly public academic dispute, defending a hurriedly written thesis composed in esoteric Pavlovian language, and no doubt very nervous, she answered questions in a halting, unconvincing, and sometimes contradictory manner. Especially in response to Kravkov’s interrogation, she conducted herself, as Frolov expressed it, “not very courageously.” This put faculty members in a bind: should they pass a candidate who had submitted a conspicuously weak thesis and failed utterly to demonstrate a convincing grasp of the issues involved, or should they antagonize her eminent and famously irascible supervisor?34
Immediately after Bezbokaia’s defense, the faculty met to decide her fate. Pavlov delivered an impassioned, bitter speech refuting Bezbokaia’s most penetrating critic, Kravkov. Portraying the pharmacologist’s criticisms as an attack upon himself and his research (“Suffice it to say that, in connection with the experiments she describes, he even found it appropriate to mention the Society for the Protection of Animals”), and as basic “misunderstandings” of the scientific issues, he invoked his own authority (as he had in the dispute with Bekhterev over localization): “One must decide: which of us is more competent regarding physiology and, specifically, the doctrine of conditional reflexes.” Kravkov stood his ground—characterizing it as “strange” that Pavlov found in his criticisms “a desire to deny the value of the ‘remarkable’ facts discovered in his laboratory, to say nothing of an impertinent attempt to shake the foundations of his doctrine of conditional reflexes.” Not at all. He objected, rather, to the fact that the thesis was “one big typographical error”; that its goal, logic, and conclusions were incomprehensible; and that Bezbokaia had responded unconvincingly to questions. “For example, to my question about the essence of the question: did the dog, upon grasping the red-hot metallic rod, sustain burns?—Miss Bezbokaia asserted that it had no burns; to the no less important question: how was the uneasy and angry behavior of the dog reflected in the count of saliva drops?—the candidate did not give the slightest satisfactory answer, and so on.” Insulted by Pavlov’s “sharp comment about my incompetence to discuss the quality of works on conditional reflexes,” Kravkov announced that he refused to review any more theses on that subject.35
As it became clear that the majority of the faculty supported Kravkov’s position, Pavlov rose, announced his resignation from the Academy, and walked out. His coworkers awaited him outside. Extremely agitated, he recounted his parting words to the faculty—casting the issue in the most exalted terms: “The greatest injustice is being done here. It is not I who suffer from this, but the future of the newest and most important division of our science of the brain. After this, I cannot, of course, remain a member of your honorable collegium. I am leaving the Academy for good.” “On their side is blind, dark power,” he added. “Let them meet. It is fine with me; I am already meetinged out.” He then left town a month earlier than usual to join his family for an extended summer vacation in Sillamiagi.36
Adopting a resolution based upon Kravkov’s arguments and their own observations at the defense, the faculty decided to have Bezbokaia revise her thesis and defend it again within three months.37
The matter, however, was far from resolved. An internationally renowned Nobel laureate and member of the Academy of Sciences, Pavlov was easily the faculty’s most prestigious member. With labs at both the Academy of Sciences and the IEM—and with his Nobel Prize money in the bank—he could afford to sacrifice his position there. He had also made clear that he was fully prepared to create a “European scandal” about the Military-Medical Academy’s shoddy treatment of him and his coworker. Frolov claims that the tsar himself wrote a letter to the head of the Academy, directing him to appease the temperamental physiologist. That is extremely unlikely, but some of Pavlov’s highly placed admirers—such as Prince Ol’denburgskii—no doubt made their opinions known.
Two weeks after rejecting Bezbokaia’s thesis, the faculty gathered again—this time with the Academy’s director in attendance and Pavlov conspicuously absent. After a long discussion, the director proposed that, since Bezbokaia’s thesis was “essentially worthy of the degree of doctor of medicine,” the faculty agree to accept it without a second defense once Pavlov had reported that she had corrected “typographical errors and unclear formulations, which diminish its scientific merit.” In other words, total capitulation to Pavlov’s demands.
Kravkov now found himself in an awkward position. Having been rudely scolded by Pavlov for criticizing the thesis as unworthy of a doctorate, and having previously won the support of his colleagues for that position, he was now left out on a limb by the higher-ups. Reaffirming his low opinion of Bezbokaia’s thesis, he objected that even to vote again was “illegal” capitulation to Pavlov’s blackmail. He abstained. By a vote of 16–5 (with six abstentions), the faculty adopted the director’s resolution and dispatched a six-member delegation to Sillamiagi with a formal letter informing Pavlov of their change of heart and asking him to remain at the Academy. (As a sop to the bruised Kravkov, the faculty also expressed “sympathy for the entirely undeserved and serious reproach addressed to him by Professor I. P. Pavlov.”)38
Enjoying the upper hand, Pavlov lorded it over his colleagues. Academician Dianin informed the faculty at a meeting of May 25 that their eminent physiologist had refused to retract his resignation, “since he was not certain that all members of the faculty have, by their signatures, expressed the wish that he not leave the Academy.” The list of signatories, another member of the delegation explained, now included twenty-six people (including the director). Of the six missing, two professors had agreed to sign and four had left the city. The delegation returned to Sillamiagi with the new letter, an explanation of the missing signatures, and a plea to reconsider.
Pavlov skipped the remaining faculty meeting of May, but sometime during the summer consented to remain. In September, Kravkov—his previous vow notwithstanding—agreed to serve on the thesis committee of another Pavlov coworker. Three months later, the institution’s scholarly secretary reported that Pavlov had certified that the 500 newly printed copies of Bezbokaia’s revised thesis contained all necessary corrections. The faculty voted without discussion to award her the doctoral degree.