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Ivan Pavlov. A Russian Life in Science. By Daniel P. Todes. Oxford University Press USA. 2014. £25.00 (hb). 880 pp. ISBN: 9780199925193

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Allan Beveridge*
Affiliation:
Queen Margaret Hospital, Whitefield Road, Dunfermline KY12 OSU, UK. Email: allanbeveridge@nhs.net
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Abstract

Type
Columns
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2015 

The great Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) is usually remembered as the man who trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. Indeed the term ‘Pavlovian’, meaning a conditioned response to stimuli, has entered the language. In this monumental and highly scholarly biography, the American historian of medicine Daniel P. Todes points out that Pavlov never trained a dog to salivate to a bell. Rather he was interested in what a study of dogs would reveal about man and, in particular, ‘our psychical experience’. In fact one of his lifelong metaphorical strategies was to view dogs as people, and people as dogs. Contrary to the popular perception of Pavlov as an early behavourist interested only in outward actions, he primarily wanted to understand inner experience.

As Todes observes, this is the first in-depth, intellectual biography of Pavlov. Hitherto, Russian scholars were inhibited from examining this great Russian icon by the oppressive political climate of their native land and outsiders had only limited access to the archives which were, in any case, written in Russian or dense technical language. Todes has demonstrated formidable powers in mastering these sources, and he has attractively related Pavlov’s life to the cultural and political background of Russia. Pavlov lived through a very eventful and turbulent period in the history of Russia. His long life stretched from the reign of Nicholas I to the first decade of Stalin’s rule. It took in the emancipation of the serfs, four lost wars, three revolutions, the rapid industrialisation of the country and the mass arrests of the Communist era.

In the 1860s when Pavlov was growing up, science became the symbol of the new, modern Russia. The march of technological progress would consign the old superstitions and religious beliefs to the past. Throughout his life, Pavlov held to the view that science was the best way of understanding humanity. For him, man was no different from the rest of nature, and the findings of the research laboratory could be applied unproblematically to the human psyche.

Pavlov and his wife were acquainted with Dostoyevsky, whose work they both devoured. Dostoyevsky had warned that the scientistic faith of the day provided a deeply impoverished vision of man and would lead to tyranny. Pavlov, an atheist, uncomfortably identified with Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, the young intellectual whose rigorous rationality prevents him from making a leap of religious faith and who is left at the end of The Brothers Karamazov in a state of madness. Indeed, as a student Pavlov suffered from mental instability and was diagnosed with a ‘disturbance of the nerves’. A moving aspect of the book is how Pavlov transforms himself from an undisciplined and unsuccessful researcher to become a Nobel Prize winner and the Grand Old Man of world physiology, feted at conferences throughout Europe and America. Pavlov also became a national hero as a result of his fearless stance against the Bolshevik regime. He was responsible for saving many friends and colleagues from the gulag and, despite his atheistic convictions, he stood up for religious freedom. Todes charts the complex game that Pavlov and the Bolsheviks played, each trying to exploit the other. Pavlov wanted research funding and the Bolsheviks wanted to portray Pavlov to the outside world as a shining example of the new Russian science. As a consequence, Pavlov was granted massive institutional support and, almost uniquely for the time, was allowed to criticise the regime.

At the end of his life, Pavlov retained his belief in scientific endeavour but came to a more modest estimation of its ability to explain the human condition. According to Todes, he concluded, ‘his own research had failed to confine the psyche within the comforting certainties of mechanistic law’. Certainly his late foray into psychiatric research proved unilluminating. Applying his canine-derived physiological principles to mental illness, he produced a simple binary schema: patients’ psychiatric disorders could be explained either in terms of the excitation or inhibition of their nervous systems.

This, then, is likely to be the definitive biography of Pavlov for some time to come, and it also casts much light on the history of science and of modern Russia.

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