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of daily living; he was the embodiment of the impractical intellectual. During his engagement, he spent what little money he had on luxuries for his fiancée and only once bought her something practical: a pair of shoes that she urgently needed for a trip. But when she got to her destination and opened her luggage, she found only one shoe. She wrote to ask what had happened, and he replied, “Don’t look for your shoe. I took it as a remembrance of you and have put it on my desk.” When they were married and living in near poverty, he often forgot to pick up his monthly salary until his wife reminded him. One winter, when he could afford little fuel for their apartment, a batch of butterflies he kept at home to study metamorphosis succumbed to the cold. When his wife complained about their poverty, he answered, exasperated, “Oh, leave me alone, please. A real misfortune has occurred. All my butterflies have died, and you are worrying about some silly trifle.”

But in the laboratory, Pavlov was practical, perfectionist, and systematic. He expected his assistants to live up to his standards, and castigated or fired those who fell short in any way, whatever the reason. During the Revolution (with which, for many years, he had no sympathy, though eventually he became a supporter of the system), one of his employees arrived late. When Pavlov upbraided him, the man said there had been street fighting en route and he had been in danger of losing his life, but Pavlov angrily replied that that was no excuse and that devotion to science should supersede all other motives. According to some accounts, he sacked the man.

That was long after Pavlov had become successful. In 1891, at the age of forty-two, he was at last appointed professor at the St. Petersburg Military Academy, and a few years later professor at St. Petersburg University. With this solid footing, he was able to organize the Institute of Experimental Medicine, the laboratory in which he conducted his research for forty years. His work during the 1890s was on digestion, which he studied by surgically creating in the stomach of laboratory dogs a little pouch or separate compartment with a fistula implanted in it. This enabled him to observe the gastric reflex (the secretion of gastric juices when the dog began to eat) without the contaminating presence of food. His findings won him a Nobel Prize in medicine in 1904, and in 1907 he reached the height of scientific prestige in Russia when he became an academician, or full member, of the Academy of Sciences.

Sometime between 1897 and 1900, in the course of his gastric-reflex research, Pavlov became aware of an odd and annoying phenomenon: the dogs would secrete gastric juices and saliva at times other than feedings—for instance, when they saw or heard their keeper shortly before a regular mealtime. At first Pavlov regarded this as a nuisance, since it interfered with the data on the quantities of digestive secretions. But he recognized that there must be an explanation for the production of such fluids when there was no food in the dog’s mouth or even nearby. An obvious one was that the dog “realized” that mealtime was near and these thoughts produced the secretions, but the resolutely antipsychological Pavlov would have nothing to do with such subjective speculations.

Though reluctant to do research on the matter, he finally decided he could look into it, since in his opinion it was an entirely physiological phenomenon—a “psychical secretion” due to a reflex in the brain caused by the stimulus of the sight or sound of the person who usually brought food. In 1902 he began to study how and when such a stimulus, inherently unconnected to the glandular response, was capable of causing it, and he spent the rest of his life investigating the phenomenon.

Although Pavlov was an expert surgeon, he spared himself the labor of creating stomach pouches for this research. Since the dogs produced saliva as well as gastric juices at the sight of their keepers, it was enough to implant a simple fistula in one of the salivary glands and hook