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Ivan Pavlov: Experimental Medicine
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Ivan Pavlov's primary interests were the study of physiology and natural sciences. He helped found the Department of Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine and continued to oversee the program for the next 45 years.
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Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov won the 1904 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Although best known for his work on reflex behaviour, Pavlov made major scientific contributions to the understanding of the digestive system.
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Ivan Pavlov was born into an impoverished family in the rural village of Ryazan, Russia. He won a government scholarship to the University of St. Petersburg and studied medicine at the Imperial Medical Academy, receiving his degree in 1883. In 1890, Pavlov was appointed to a professorship at the St. Petersburg Military Academy and a few years later joined the faculty of the University of St. Petersburg. He organized the Institute of Experimental Medicine in 1895, which was to be his research laboratory for the next 40 years.
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Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born to a Russian Orthodox priestly family in Ryazan in September 1849. He began his education locally but later progressed to a seminary and then to the University of St. Petersburg where he completed courses in Physiology and Medicine. Following his graduation from the University and from the Military Academy of Medicine in St. Petersburg he continued further studies in Breslau and Leipzig in Germany.
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In 1903, at the 14th International Medical Congress in Madrid, Pavlov presented his paper on The Experimental Psychology and Psychopathology of Animals. In this paper the definitions of conditioned and other reflexes were given. Pavlov deduced three ideas for the theory of reflexes: the principle of determinism, the principle of analysis and synthesis, and the principle of structure. The development of these principles by Pavlov and his school helped towards the building-up of a scientific theory of medicine. Experiments done by Pavlov and his students showed that conditioned reflexes start in the cerebral cortex, which acts as the prime distributor and organizer of all activity of the organism and is responsible for the equilibrium of an animal (Babkin, 1949). Research in Pavlov's labs over the next few years showed for the first time the basic laws that govern the cortex of the brain hemispheres.
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It was at the Institute of Experimental Medicine in the years 1891-1900 that Pavlov did the bulk of his research on the physiology of digestion. It was here that he developed the surgical method of the «chronic» experiment with extensive use of fistulas, which enabled the functions of various organs to be observed continuously under relatively normal conditions. This discovery opened a new era in the development of physiology, for until then the principal method used had been that of «acute» vivisection, and the function of an organism had only been arrived at by a process of analysis. This meant that research into the functioning of any organ necessitated disruption of the normal interrelation between the organ and its environment. Such a method was inadequate as a means of determining how the functions of an organ were regulated or of discovering the laws governing the organism as a whole under normal conditions - problems which had hampered the development of all medical science. With his method of research, Pavlov opened the way for new advances in theoretical and practical medicine.
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