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This is a definitive, deeply researched biography of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) and is the first scholarly biography to be published in any language. The book is Todes's magnum opus, which he has been working on for some twenty years. Todes makes use of a wealth of archival material to portray Pavlov's personality, life, times, and scientific work. Combining personal documents with a close reading of scientific texts, Todes fundamentally reinterprets Pavlov's famous research on conditional reflexes. Contrary to legend, Pavlov was not a behaviorist (a misimpression captured in the false iconic image of his "training a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell"); rather, he soug...
Russian physiologist and Nobel Prize winner Ivan Pavlov is most famous for his development of the concept of the conditional reflex and the classic experiment in which he trained a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell. In Pavlov's Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise, Daniel P. Todes explores Pavlov's early work in digestive physiology through the structures and practices of his landmark laboratory—the physiology department of the Imperial Institute for Experimental Medicine. In Lectures on the Work of the Main Digestive Glands, for which Pavlov won the Nobel Prize in 1904, the scientist frequently referred to the experiments of his coworkers and stated t...
Hailed as the "Prince of World Physiology," Ivan Pavlov continues to influence scientists today. His pioneering research on digestion, the brain, and behavior still provides important insights into the minds of animals--including humans--and is an inspiring example of imaginative experimental technique. Pavlov graduated from the theological seminary in his native Ryazan, Russia, in 1869 but almost immediately switched to medicine and enrolled at St. Petersburg University. He became interested in the physiology of circulation and digestion, which led him to the study of conditional and unconditional reflexes. He conducted thousands of experiments with dogs, developing a way to use a dogs sali...
The first book in English to examine in detail the scientific work of 19th-century Russian evolutionists, and the first in any language to explore the relationship of their theories to their economic, political, and natural milieu.
This book places childbirth in early-modern England within a wider network of social institutions and relationships. Starting with illegitimacy - the violation of the marital norm - it proceeds through marriage to the wider gender-order and so to the ’ceremony of childbirth’, the popular ritual through which women collectively controlled this, the pivotal event in their lives. Focussing on the seventeenth century, but ranging from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, this study offers a new viewpoint on such themes as the patriarchal family, the significance of illegitimacy, and the structuring of gender-relations in the period.
Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, sharp, inspiring The 17th-century calculus of Newton and Leibniz was built on shaky foundations, and it wasn't until the 18th and 19th centuries that mathematicians--especially Bolzano, Cauchy, and Weierstrass--began to establish a rigorous basis for the subject. The resulting discipline is now known to mathematicians as analysis. This book, aimed at readers with some grounding in mathematics, describes the nascent evolution of mathematical analysis, its development as a subject in its own right, and its wide-ranging applications in mathematics and science, modelling reality from acoustics to fluid dynamics, from biological systems to quantum theory. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Addiction is a subject which straddles public and personal interests; societal and criminal justice concerns; and family, social, and medical responses. It is a continuing area of uncertainty and concern for society and professionals trained in the field. This Very Short Introduction presents the basic facts about addiction: what it is, how and why it develops, how it is treated, and how society can respond to it. Addictions to both illicit drugs and licit drugs (e.g., alcohol) are covered, as is the possibility that certain behaviours not involving drug use (e.g., compulsive gambling) can qualify as addictions. Keith Humphreys provides a...
A pioneering history of medical care in Stalin's Gulag--showing how doctors and nurses cared for inmates in appalling conditions A byword for injustice, suffering, and mass mortality, the Gulag exploited prisoners, compelling them to work harder for better rations in shocking conditions. From 1930 to 1953, eighteen million people passed through this penal-industrial empire. Many inmates, not reaching their quotas, succumbed to exhaustion, emaciation, and illness. It seems paradoxical that any medical care was available in the camps. But it was in fact ubiquitous. By 1939 the Gulag Sanitary Department employed 10,000 doctors, nurses and paramedics--about 40 percent of whom were prisoners. Dan Healey explores the lives of the medical staff who treated inmates in the Gulag. Doctors and nurses faced extremes of repression, supply shortages, and isolation. Yet they still created hospitals, re-fed prisoners, treated diseases, and "saved" a proportion of their patients. They taught apprentices and conducted research too. This groundbreaking account offers an unprecedented view of Stalin's forced-labour camps as experienced by its medical staff.
The history of ideas has played a central role in Russia's political and social history. Understanding its intellectual tradition and the way the intelligentsia have shaped the nation is crucial to understanding the Russia of today. This history examines important intellectual and cultural currents (the Enlightenment, nationalism, nihilism, and religious revival) and key themes (conceptions of the West and East, the common people, and attitudes to capitalism and natural science) in Russian intellectual history. Concentrating on the Golden Age of Russian thought in the mid-nineteenth century, the contributors also look back to its eighteenth-century origins in the flowering of culture following the reign of Peter the Great, and forward to the continuing vitality of Russia's classical intellectual tradition in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. With brief biographical details of over fifty key thinkers and an extensive bibliography, this book provides a fresh, comprehensive overview of Russian intellectual history.
Scientists and other keen observers of the natural world sometimes make or write a statement pertaining to scientific activity that is destined to live on beyond the brief period of time for which it was intended. This book serves as a collection of these statements from great philosophers and thought–influencers of science, past and present. It allows the reader quickly to find relevant quotations or citations. Organized thematically and indexed alphabetically by author, this work makes readily available an unprecedented collection of approximately 18,000 quotations related to a broad range of scientific topics.