PAWLOW, J. P. [PAVLOV].

Die Arbeit der Verdauungsdrüsen.

Weisbaden, J. F. Bergman, 1898.

Large8vo. Bound uncut with the original wrappers in contemporary half cloth with marbled boards and gilt lettering to spine. Front wrapper partly detached and previous owner's inscription to top of front wrapper. Otherwise a fine and clean copy. XII, 199, (5) pp.

First German (and first in general) translation of Pavlov's seminal work on the digestion glands in which he demonstrated that the effects of feeding were transmitted to the gastric glands even when food was prevented from entering the stomach. (One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine 86).

"Pavlov summarized his experiments in a series of lectures given in 1896 and published in Russian the following year. A German translation appeared in 1898 and an English one in 1902. For his work on physiology of digestion Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1904." (One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine 86).

"Scientific Research In the years 1891-1903, Pavlov concentrated on the studies of the digestive system that were systematized in his Lectures on the Work of the Main Gastric Glands (1897) and won him a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1904). In this research, Pavlov’s "physiological thinking" was embodied in the "chronic experiment," and his analysis of data was structured by his metaphor of the digestive system as a precise and purposive chemical factory. For the chronic experiment, experimental dogs were prepared surgically with an operation designed to give the experimenter access to a digestive gland. Experiments began only after the dog had recovered and regained a "normal" state. These operations included the esophagotomy, which separated the cavities of the mouth and stomach, allowing Pavlov to use sham-feeding experiments to demonstrate the centrality of a psychic actor, appetite, in the first phase of digestive secretion. To study the second, nervous-chemical phase of digestion, he developed an innervated version of Heidenhain’s isolated stomach. In Pavlov’s isolated sac, the main stomach remained continuous with the digestive tract, but a smaller pouch, isolated from food by a mucous membrane, maintained its nervous connections to the larger stomach. For Pavlov, as a nervist, the innervation of the isolated sac assured that its glandular reactions would mirror those in the main stomach. Inserting a fistula in this small stomach, Pavlov and his co-workers measured the quantity and quality of its glandular secretions, which Pavlov analyzed in his "characteristic secretory curves." For Pavlov, these curves reflected the precise and purposive action of the glands as they processed different foods." (DSB)

Bibliotheca Walleriana 7257.

Order-nr.: 46198