Ivan Pavlov: A Very Short Introduction

This short biography explores the life and science of the famous Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, focusing on his lifelong quest to understand the "torments of our consciousness." Daniel P. Todes analyzes Pavlov's Nobel Prize-winning research on digestion and his iconic studies of conditional reflexes. He demonstrates that, contrary to myth, this brilliant experimenter did not use a bell, was uninterested in training dogs, was not a behaviorist, and was a profoundly anthropomorphic thinker. He also explores the importance of his little-known research on chimps, and his final, unfinished manuscript on the relationship of science, Christianity, and Bolshevism.

Daniel P. Todes is Professor Emeritus of History of Medicine at John Hopkins University. His research concerns the relationship of scientific ideas to the context in which they are generated, and the history of science and medicine in Russia. He is the author of Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought and three previous books about Pavlov: Pavlov's Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise; a short biography for young adults: Ivan Pavlov: Exploring the Animal Machine; and the first archive-based scholarly biography in any language, Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science. His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, the International Research and Exchanges Board, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.