On September 14, in the year 1849, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born in a small village in Ryazan, Russia. Pavlov was originally going to follow in his father's footsteps, to enter priesthood, and even enrolled in a theological seminary, but after reading some works of Charles Darwin, Ivan left the seminary for the University of St. Petersburg in 1870. Pavlov completed a third course of study at the Academy of Medical surgery, and was awarded his first gold medallion. He began to pursue studies in Physiology and chemistry. He also discovered dyna ...view middle of the document...
Pavlov began a study in digestion that would, in later years, be the reason why he would become a household name. While looking at the digestive process in dogs, especially the interaction between the stomach and salivation, he came to a realisation of how closely liked they were by reflexes in the autonomic nervous system. Pavlov noticed that without salivation, the stomach didn't start the digestion process. He wanted to see if external stimuli could affect this process. By ringing a bell at the same time he gave the experimental dogs their food; over a long time period, he noticed that when he rang the bell, the dogs would begin to salivate, even if no food was there at the time.In the Year 1903, Ivan published hid findings calling this a "conditioned reflex" different from innate reflex. He mentioned in it that if the bell were rang too often without food being presented, then eventually the dog would stop salivating at the sound of the bell. In the Soviet Union, Russia as well as the rest of the world, Pavlov was held in extremely high regard.In 1904, he won the Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine for his research on digestion. In 1935, the government had laboratory built in his name for him to continue his work, but only a year later, on February 27, Ivan Pavlov died at age 87 in Leningrad.
