Pavlov's Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise (review)

Daniel Todes's study of Ivan Pavlov and his laboratory is clever in the best sense of the word. The cleverness begins with the title: we don't usually associate physiology with factories. It continues to the epilogue, by which time both hard-nosed realists and sociologists of science will agree that they have been privy to a rare treat: a book that through its combination of complexity and subtlety genuinely illuminates its subject. This book embodies modern history of science at its very best.

It is no secret that Todes has been working on Pavlov for a long time. A biography and a generous selection of Pavlov's extensive correspondence were the expected products. I hope they will still appear, but, as Todes explains in his introduction, the strict biographical narrative seemed inappropriate when Pavlov in 1891 rather unexpectedly became director of the physiology division of the Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg. He was already in his forties, solidly middle-aged in nineteenth-century Russia, and with a career in experimental medicine that was going nowhere. He soon became the star of the Institute, as the manager of a remarkably productive physiology factory.

The factory model is more Todes than Pavlov, but it fits beautifully, and in a manner that Pavlov would, I think, have recognized. We are used to the way that eminent scientists, busy with administration, grant applications, scientific politics, and the other distractions (or rewards) of success, still "run" laboratories. Mutatis mutandis, this was Pavlov in his laboratory. He was more of a daily presence than are many modern scientists: he assigned the topics, and planned and frequently helped with the experiments on his dogs—but his laboratory would not have been quite what it was without the steady stream of practikanty who peopled it. These ambitious young physicians, needing a thesis to further their medical careers, provided Pavlov with the hands and eyes to further the vision that his brain fabricated. Todes analyzes laboratory life in this factory from its establishment until Pavlov's Nobel Prize of 1904. That he had to wait until the fourth Prize was, Todes shows, due to the worry felt by some members of the early Nobel Committee as to how much of his laboratory's work was actually Pavlov's. It was just one of several of ways in which Pavlov's laboratory was forward-looking.

Todes uses the factory framework in a number of creative ways. Like any productive factory, Pavlov's laboratory produced a number of products: knowledge claims (a wonderfully neutral way of avoiding Whiggish hindsight); loyal disciples (and a few disgruntled ones); gastric juice from the dogs, which enjoyed brief therapeutic fashion in treating a number of gastrointestinal disorders and produced a growing income for the laboratory; and, finally, Pavlov himself, who emerged from obscurity to international scientific prominence during the fifteen years of Todes's analysis.

There is much more to this subtly presented account. Todes has mined the printed and archival Russian sources to bring to life a creative physiological laboratory. Pavlov's dogs, for instance, occupy an appropriately prominent place, for without their docile cooperation, much of the laboratory's work would have been impossible. Cats, pigs, and other animals turned out to be less than the physiologist's best friend, especially in participating in "chronic" experiments—that is, those in which the animal is used repeatedly after an operation. A dog named Druzhok ("Little Friend") was especially patient, lying sedately while its stomach secretions were measured day after day.

Pavlov lived for more than three decades after receiving his Nobel Prize, and by then, the work on conditional reflexes was just beginning. This is merely one of many reasons why we can hope that we have not heard the last of...