91av

Pavlov’s Physiology Factory by Daniel Todes, Johns Hopkins University Press, $58, ISBN 0801866901

MENTION Ivan Pavlov’s name and it’s odds on that most people will recognise it. “Ah, yes. The dog man. He made a dog salivate by ringing a bell. Conditioned reflex, wasn’t it called?” The reply is almost as much a conditioned reflex as the dog’s. But apart from that, Pavlov remains unknown to most people. In fact, Pavlov became the head of Russia’s first large-scale physiological laboratory in 1891, the “factory” of Daniel Todes’s title, and made it unique. The factory’s purpose was to investigate the complicated processes involved in digestion, and the animals used in research and experimentation were dogs. Ingenious surgical techniques were used to obtain, for example, gastric secretions, from dogs “at work” as production units. Preparations from these were sold as medicines, and this sideline proved important in the factory’s finances. The research enormously expanded our knowledge of digestive physiology, and made Pavlov an international figure and finally a Nobel prizewinner in 1904. There was some debate about this, for Pavlov was an unusual boss and insisted that his whole staff be recognised as well as himself.

Pavlov’s Physiology Factory is not a biography, concentrating only on this early period of Pavlov’s career. It contains everything that you could want to know, but it’s a somewhat flat read without professional interest to keep you going.