Daily Almanac for
Oct 13, 2008
Search White Pages
Info search tips
Bio search tips

Encyclopedia

Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich

Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich (ēvän' pētrô'vich päv'luf) [key], 18491936, Russian physiologist and experimental psychologist. He was professor at the military medical academy and director of the physiology department at the Institute for Experimental Medicine, St. Petersburg, from 1890. Pavlov was a skillful ambidextrous surgeon; using dogs as experimental animals, he established fistulas from various parts of the digestive tract by which he obtained secretions of the salivary glands, pancreas, and liver without disturbing the nerve and blood supply. For his work on the physiology of the digestive glands he received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Using the same technique to create an artificial exterior pouch of the stomach, he experimented on nervous stimulation of gastric secretions and thus discovered the conditioned reflex (see behaviorism), which has had widespread influence in neurology and psychology. He also demonstrated that specific areas in the cerebral cortex are concerned with specific reflexes and based on these findings a mechanistic theory of human behavior that found political favor; in 1935 the government built a laboratory for him. His chief work was Conditioned Reflexes (1926, tr. 1927).

See biography by B. P. Babkin (1949); studies by E. Strauss (1963), H. Cuny (tr. 1965), and I. P. Frolov (tr. 1937, repr. 1970).

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

    • Cite
    • Print
    • Bookmark

More on Ivan Petrovich Pavlov from Infoplease:

See more Encyclopedia articles on: Medicine: Biographies


Premium Partner Content
HighBeam Research

Related content from HighBeam Research on: Ivan Petrovich Pavlov

Additional search results provided by HighBeam Research, LLC. © Copyright 2005. All rights reserved.