Good Health and How We Won It, With an Account of the New HygieneSinclair, Upton
Science
Good Health and How We Won It, With an Account of the New Hygiene
Sinclair, Upton
Hygiene
“The dog had been prepared beforehand by the attendant. Little empty
bottles were attached to the collecting tubes, and as soon as the dog
saw Pawlow, he seemed to be very happy, and wagged his tail, and his
eyes gave evidence of satisfaction; but there was no flow of saliva
until Professor Pawlow brought near to his nose a bottle containing
some powdered meat. He took out the cork in the presence of the dog,
turned out a little of it in his hand, shook it in the bottle and
brought it near to the dog’s nose. The dog began to sniff it, licked
his chops, snapped his jaws, reached out after it, and in less than two
minutes the saliva began to flow very profusely, and it was not more
than fifteen or twenty seconds before the saliva was pouring down into
the bottles.
“Professor Pawlow, then, after holding the bottle out before the dog
for about thirty seconds, put the stopper into it, and put it behind
him out of sight, and in a very few seconds the saliva ceased to flow.
Then he brought it back again, showed it to the dog, brought it near
his nose, allowed him to smell it but kept it just out of his reach all
the time, and the saliva poured out again freely. He continued this
until the dog finally made up his mind he was not going to get any
meat, and when the powder was brought near to him he paid no attention
to it, but turned his head around and looked very disappointed and very
ugly, and at that point, the saliva ceased to flow.
“That was a very remarkable thing to me. The meat was right there,
he could smell it, but he knew he was not going to get it, so he was
angry, and as his state of mind changed, the secretion of saliva was
wholly arrested. I was very much surprised. Of course, I believe
thoroughly in the importance of being in a happy state of mind when
eating, but I really did not appreciate thoroughly the importance of
those things; I did not fully appreciate how positive an inhibitor of
the activity of the salivary glands an unhappy state might be.
“But a common experiment made in India shows the same idea. When an
Anglo-Indian has lost anything of value, he has his whole family of
servants brought to him to find out which one has stolen it. A common
test is to stand them all up in a row, and then to give each one a
morsel of dry rice to chew. They must chew this rice for five minutes,
and then the master goes around and examines each man’s mouth. The
mouth which is dry is the mouth of the culprit, and the state of that
man’s mind has the effect of arresting the flow of saliva. Pawlow has
shown that this is a positive physiologic law and operates upon the
dogs as well as upon human beings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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