Ivan Pavlov Quotes (30 Quotes)


    Our success was mainly due to the fact that we stimulated the nerves of animals that easily stood on their own feet and were not subjected to any painful stimulus either during or immediately before stimulation of their nerves.

    Science demands from a man all his life. If you had two lives that would not be enough for you. Be passionate in your work and in your searching.

    Finally, as the digestive canal is a complex system, a series of separate chemical laboratories, I cut the connections between them in order to investigate the course of phenomena in each particular laboratory; thus I resolved the digestive canal into several separate parts.

    It is clear to all that the animal organism is a highly complex system consisting of an almost infinite series of parts connected both with one another and, as a total complex, with the surrounding world, with which it is in a state of equilibrium.

    Edible substances evoke the secretion of thick, concentrated saliva. Why? The answer, obviously, is that this enables the mass of food to pass smoothly through the tube leading from the mouth into the stomach.


    But man has still another powerful resource: natural science with its strictly objective methods.

    It has long been known for sure that the sight of tasty food makes a hungry man's mouth water; also lack of appetite has always been regarded as an undesirable phenomenon, from which one might conclude that appetite is essentially linked with the process of digestion.

    So the stimulation effected by the act of eating reaches the gastric glands by means of the nerve fibres that are contained in the vagus nerves.

    The digestive canal represents a tube passing through the entire organism and communicating with the external world, i.e. as it were the external surface of the body, but turned inwards and thus hidden in the organism.

    Appetite, craving for food, is a constant and powerful stimulator of the gastric glands.

    Precise knowledge of what happens to the food entering the organism must be the subject of ideal physiology, the physiology of the future.

    Gradualness, gradualness, and gradualness. From the very beginning of your work, school yourself to severe gradualness in the accumulation of knowledge.

    The physiologist who succeeds in penetrating deeper and deeper into the digestive canal becomes convinced that it consists of a number of chemical laboratories equipped with various mechanical devices.

    Our experiments not only proved the existence of a nervous apparatus in the above-mentioned glands, but also disclosed some facts clearly showing the participation of these nerves in normal activity.

    Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin.

    With each meal, when edible substances find their way into the oral cavity, thick and viscous saliva containing much mucus flows out of these glands.

    While you are experimenting, do not remain content with the surface of things.

    In the case of the stomach, however, the nerves of the glandular cells were always severed when constructing an artificially isolated pouch and this, naturally, affected the normal work of the stomach.

    Thus, the purposeful relationship of phenomena is based on the specificity of the stimuli, that correspond to similarly specific reactions.

    Physiology has, at last, gained control over the nerves which stimulate the gastric glands and the pancreas.

    School yourself to demureness and patience. Learn to inure yourself to drudgery in science. Learn, compare, collect the facts.

    Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise.

    Only by observing this condition would the results of our work be regarded as fully conclusive and as having elucidated the normal course of the phenomena.

    The gastric laboratory uses its protein ferment under an acid reaction.

    It is not accidental that all phenomena of human life are dominated by the search for daily bread - the oldest link connecting all living things, man included, with the surrounding nature.

    Thanks to our present surgical methods in physiology we can demonstrate at any time almost all phenomena of digestion without the loss of even a single drop of blood, without a single scream from the animal undergoing the experiment.

    Facts are the air of the scientists. Without them you never can fly.

    From the described experiment it is clear that the mere act of eating, the food even not reaching the stomach, determines the stimulation of the gastric glands.

    It goes without saying that the desire to accomplish the task with more confidence, to avoid wasting time and labour, and to spare our experimental animals as much as possible, made us strictly observe all the precautions taken by surgeons in respect to their patients.

    As was to be expected, the discovery of the nervous apparatus of the salivary glands immediately impelled physiologists to seek a similar apparatus in other glands lying deeper in the digestive canal.


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