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# The physiologist Ivan Pavlov with his colleagues and students of the Military Medical Academy before a demonstration of experiments on the transmission of conditioned reflexes
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/fiziolog-ivan-pavlov-s-sotrudnikami-i-slushateliami-voenno-meditsinskoi-akademii-pered-demonstratsiei-opytov-po-peredachu-uslovnykh-refleksov/
- Published: 2026-08-10T19:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:26.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Science, People, Nature, Saint Petersburg

Professor Georgy Konradi recalled that Ivan Petrovich had quite literally grown into one with the dog as an object of study, and that when demonstrating a frog to an audience he regularly slipped and called it a dog.

But the atmosphere of the laboratories was described in most detail by Alexander Chizhevsky, who visited the Institute of Experimental Medicine in 1926\. By his account, it was a veritable kingdom of dogs: smells and voices reached one from every side; in every laboratory there stood wooden frames on large tables, and in the frames dogs, for the most part sheepdogs; from somewhere far off came a faint howling from the operating theatre, and somewhere a puppy whimpered.

According to the recollections of the physiologist Pyotr Anokhin, when Pavlov lacked data to explain the facts, he would say that one had only to sit a while with a dog, and there they would surely get what they wanted.

Pavlov formulated his attitude to the subject as early as 1893, in the article "Vivisection", where he wrote that one must acknowledge with bitterness that man's best domestic animal becomes a victim of experiment precisely because of its high mental and moral development, while experiments are done on cats only out of necessity, since they are impatient, noisy and spiteful creatures. In chronic experiments, he said, the dog is irreplaceable and touching, since it becomes, as it were, a participant in the experiment upon itself.

"Pavlov's dogs" passed through the Military Medical Academy, the Institute of Experimental Medicine and the physiological laboratory of the Academy of Sciences. There were hundreds of them. About a hundred dogs were being kept at one time in the vivarium and laboratories when the Leningrad flood of 1924 struck. The cages were then flooded to two thirds of their height, and the animals were hauled out by being dunked head and all in the water; almost all were saved, but many developed a neurosis, which in the end gave rise to an entire research programme on experimental neuroses.

Forty dogs are photographed by name in an album that his colleagues presented to Pavlov in May 1927, together with a list of the staff who owned them. The dogs were called Postrel, Milord, Bek, Avgust, Pingel, Dzhon, Dzhoy, Boy and Mampus. Dzhon, a German pointer, was named after Pavlov himself in the English manner, and was demonstrated at the congress of physiologists in 1935.

In 1926 his colleagues presented Pavlov with a comic diploma in the name of his four-legged "collaborators", with watercolour portraits of four dogs and a remark beneath each. The Coward-Holy Fool protests by refusing food against insulting psychological nicknames; Napoleon observes that the master is asleep, and serves him right; the Enigmatic Nature asks the jubilarian how many of them are still left. Each dog represented one of the four types of nervous system.

Researchers note that the dogs lived long. Postrel worked in the laboratory for more than fifteen years. The director of the "Pavlov Koltushi" museum says that the fistula allowed a dog to live normally, and certain animals lived to fifteen.

In August 1935, six months before his death, Academician Pavlov set up a monument to a nameless dog in the garden of the Institute of Experimental Medicine; he himself discussed the design with the sculptor Bezpalov and himself composed the inscriptions on the bas-reliefs. One of them reads: "Let the dog, the helper and friend of man since prehistoric times, be offered up as a sacrifice to science, but our dignity obliges us to see that this always takes place without unnecessary torment".