Home / Browse / Sciences / [Cyrillic:] Lektsii o rabote glavnykh pishchevaritel'nykh zhelez.

PAVLOV, Ivan Petrovich.

[Cyrillic:] Lektsii o rabote glavnykh pishchevaritel'nykh zhelez.

First edition of Pavlov's celebrated Lectures on the work of the principal digestive glands, first delivered at St Petersburg the previous year, the greatest contribution to our understanding of the physiology of digestion and the work that led to his being awarded the Nobel prize for medicine in 1905. The book first describes and illustrates the artificial stomach for dogs used by Pavlov to produce gastric juices uncontaminated by food. His earliest experiments involved the reflex action induced in dog by the sight and smell of food, but his later experiments, also described here, tackled the far more complicated process involved in stimuli other than food, for example the rattle of a familiar platter. "From a series of experiments increasingly detailed, and a tabulation of results increasingly exact, he found that virtually any natural phenomenon may be developed into a conditional stimulus to produce the selected response … The elaboration of these experiments and their extension to children demonstrated how great a proportion of human behaviour is explicable as a series of conditioned reflexes. Indeed some psychologists seem nowadays to believe that behaviour is all. Pavlov's results are, indeed, clearly complementary to those of Freud and many regard them as of more fundamental significance" (PMM).

Octavo. Later Russian half calf, raised bands, spine lettered in blind. Diagrams and tables in the text. Russian blindstamp to front free endpaper, faint inkstamp (mostly erased) to rear pastedown. Extremities lightly rubbed, title leaf cleanly torn across upper outer corner just touching last letter of the author's name, neatly restored on blank verso; a very good copy.

Don't understand our descriptions? Try reading our Glossary

Ask Us a Question | Print | Add to wishlist
Email to a Friend