"Perhaps the greatest contribution to our knowledge of the physiology of digestion"

PAVLOV, Ivan Petrovich.

Lektsii o rabote glavnykh pishchevaritel'nykh zhelez [Lectures on the work of the principal digestive glands].

St. Petersburg: I. N. Kushnereff for the Ministry of Communications, 1897.

1st Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. Item #003964

8vo (180 x 129 mm). [6], ii, 223 [1] pp., several diagrams in text (one full-page); last two leaves listing works by the author and his colleagues. Contemporary Russian half calf over marbled boards, spine lettered in black (spine ends chipped, joints split but cords holding, corners bumped and worn, calf over spine with traces of waterstaining). Except for the title page which shows light finger-soiling, the text pages are crisp and clean throughout. Provenance: Ownership insciption in Russian hand on title. A fine copy in untouched binding. ----

RARE FIRST EDITION of "perhaps the greatest contribution to our knowledge of the physiology of digestion" (Garrison-Morton-Norman), containing the first demonstration of what Pavlov later named the 'conditioned reflex'. Pavlov was the first to successfully devise a method of studying the physiology of digestion in healthy animals. For his work Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology in 1904.
In 1852, Friedrich Bidder and Carl Schmidt had observed that the sight of food produced a flow of gastric juices in a dog, but Pavlov was the first researcher to observe the process in its entirety and to do so without injury to the animal subject. A skilled surgeon, Pavlov 'was successful in producing gastric fistulas without damaging the nerve supply and was also able to create fistulas in the salivary glands, pancreas and intestines. More importantly, he was able to restore his experimental animals postoperatively to a nearly normal state, and this enabled him to observe them over long periods, in keeping with his dictum that organs, and indeed the entire organism, must be studied under natural conditions. Through various experiments, Pavlov was able to demonstrate that the effects of feeding were transmitted to the gastric glands by nervous channels, so that gastric juice could be made to flow from the gastric glands even when food was prevented from entering the stomach. He called the flow of gastric juice that occurred without the actual ingestion of food . . . "psychic secretion" (Grolier/Medicine). Pavlov's later investigation of this phenomenon, pursued in the context of his studies of behaviour and of the physiology of the brain, led him to develop the concept of the 'conditioned reflex,' which he applied to glandular activity that is initiated in response to environmental stimuli in contrast to the 'unconditioned reflex' of internally activated processes like digestion. From this basic foundation, Pavlov went further, finding that the conditioned reflex described a mode of individual adaptation that existed throughout the animal world. He located the conditioned reflex in the brain's cortex, and described the function of the nerve cells in the transmission of stimuli that resulted in psychological conditioning (imprinting). From this initial research into the physiology of the digestive process, Pavlov and his followers extended their ideas to the complex behavior patterns of human beings, anticipating, perhaps unwittingly, the physiological and psychological manipulation of the mind that has become so important in the last half of this century. This unpretentious volume has influenced the social sciences as profoundly as has Darwin's theory of evolution and Freud's concept of the subconscious, and many of the mechanisms that determine our behavior today owe their conceptual basis to the work of this great Russian scientist.
Because of the wide-ranging significance of his discovery of the conditioned reflex, in recent years Pavlov "has come to be regarded as a mechanist who saw complex behaviour as the sum of individual conditioned reflexes. This is a profound error, since in Pavlov's view the brain, through its capacity for subtle analysis and complex synthesis, integrates a vast range of conditioned reflexes into coherent behaviour corresponding to the specific circumstances and needs of the organism. If in the early stages of his work Pavlov and his students were chiefly concerned with the study of elementary conditioned reflexes, they later turned to purposeful study of the more complex forms" (DSB).
The original Russsian edition of the Lectures is one of the rarest modern medical treatises. When the Grolier Club held its celebrated "One Hundred Books Famous in Science" exhibition in New York in 1958, a copy from a Moscow library was shown, and in the "Printing and the Mind of Man" exhibition in London in 1963, it was the late Ian Fleming's copy of the German translation (1898) that was exhibited, although the Russian title was cited in the 1967 "Descriptive Catalogue." French and English editions appeared in 1901 and 1902 respectively.
Bibliography & References: PMM 385; Garrison-Morton-Norman 1022; Horblit 83; Grolier/Medicine 85; DSB X, p.435.

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