Going to the Dogs
Ivan Pavlov is one of the
most widely-recognized figures on mental conditioning, but he did so much more
than that in his lifetime. Not only was he almost ordained as a priest, but he
made major advances in circulatory medicine, physiology and the nervous system.
Personal History
Ivan Pavlov was born in
1849, the son of a priest in the town of Ryazan in pre-Communist Russia. He
learned to read at an early age, but a subsequent accident prevented him from
going to school until he was 11. He always had a natural curiosity, what he
called “an instinct for research,” and he put it to good use.
When he graduated from
school he went into a seminary, but left for the University of Saint Petersburg
before he could graduate. In Saint Petersburg he entered the Physics and Math
Department. During his fourth year he presented work on the structure of the
pancreas that gained him schoolwide fame.
Unsatisfied with his
level of learning, he graduated from the Department of Physics and Math and
then enrolled in the Academy of Medical Surgery and then the Veterinary
Institute. Eventually he graduated, but not before gaining a fellowship at the
Academy, where he was instrumental in mapping response patterns in the Human
circulatory system.
Ivan Pavlov died in 1936,
proceeding one of his four surviving children by only a year.
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