Ivan Pavlov and the Sound of History
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born in 1849 in Ryazan, a provincial city 200 kilometers southeast of Moscow, and today a regional capital of half a million people. The son of a village priest, Pavlov grew up in a household of candles and icons, soups and samovars. As a child he suffered from several illnesses. He was intense, observant, argumentative, and, according to a fifth-grade report, “highly food-motivated.”
At twenty-one, Pavlov entered the University of St. Petersburg to study physics and mathematics, but biology soon exerted the stronger gravitational pull (and avoided any actual lectures on gravity). Switching to medicine, he trained at the Imperial Academy, and became director of a physiological laboratory. His early work concerned the pancreas and the nerves of the heart. But soon, what most intrigued Pavlov was digestion before digestion: the way the body prepared for food before food arrived. The smell of bread, the footsteps of an attendant, the clatter of a dish could summon gastric juices and saliva. The stomach...had a memory??
But the journey to his greatest experiments was littered with many decades of failures. One breed of poodle proved too melancholic and would stare silently at its food like a minor Russian poet. Spaniels were promising but theatrical. Terriers responded only by noisily passing gas.
By around 1903, when Pavlov was in his early fifties, success at last. A buzzer could persuade the body that lunch had arrived.
This discovery made Pavlov famous, but that brought its own threats.
Few knew, but from the 1880s, Pavlov developed a strict luncheon habit. Every day he ate the same meal: one pyrogi and a small teacup of borscht, beginning only after the noon bells of St. Piotr’s had rung. If a junior assistant clinked a spoon prematurely, Pavlov would stop the entire lunch, recompose himself, then sit motionless as he waited for the next hour.
By 1899, Pavlov sometimes shooed away the technicians and insisted on washing the dogs’ food dishes himself, often a half-dozen times or more, until his hands were reddened.
By the time of the Nobel Prize in 1904, awarded for his work on digestion, Pavlov could enter the Institute only by taking four steps forward, six back, three forward, five back, and eight forward. His staff became expert in camouflage. Visiting journalists were delayed with tea. Photographers were positioned at angles flattering to both Pavlov and the stairsteps.
None of this diminished Pavlov’s reputation. If anything, it deepened the aura around him. If he himself possessed a few extra reflexes, well, that showed professional commitment. No one expects a chemist to be free of smells or the blacksmith to have other than burly hands.
The Revolution of 1917, however, introduced difficulties. Pavlov had developed a troublesome excess salivation in response to doors opening and closing. A young Bolshevik surgeon, recently promoted on the grounds of enthusiasm alone, interpreted this symptom as rabies. Pavlov was ordered quarantined for thirty days.
His last months were spent in a padded room whose insulation protected him from the barking of dogs in the courtyard below and from the distant bell of a tramline. He died in 1936, and was soon the subject of endless eulogies. And somewhere, a bell kept ringing.
