P. V. Posnikov: A Russian Pioneer in Physiology

Abstract

While there is considerable evidence of early research in physiology by Servetus, Fabricius, and William Harveyscientists who lived and worked in the sixteenth centurythere are no historical records available of research or contributions by Russian scientists in that field before the latter half of the nineteenth century, when three brilliant physiologists, Sechenov, Tsion and Pavlov, appeared on the horizon of European science. To the majority of medical scholars of our time, the best known Russian scientist is certainly Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (184&-1936), to whom the 1904 Nobel Prize was awarded for his research in physiology. Yet it was Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov ( 18291905), the predecessor of Pavlov by a quarter of a century, who became known as the first Russian physiologist. Sechenov's scientific papers were the first contributions by a native Russian scientist to be published in the European scientific press (The Virchow Archives). In his native land he is acknowledged as the father of Russian physiology,1 a distinction earned for original research in neurophysiology and for his work The Reflexes of the Brain, which was published in 1860. His contribution was accepted as the initial milestone in the history of Russian physiology by Russian as well as other scientists, and his position remained uncontested until a Soviet medical historian recalled to life a seventeenth century Russian physician to challenge it. In his determined search for clues on which to base an early claim to Russian achievement in the field of science, the Soviet medical historian Koshtoyants resurrected Peter Vasilievich Posnikov, the first native Russian to receive the degree of Doctor of Medicine and Philosophy from the University of Padua in May, 1695, and declared him the first Russian physiologist. This claim is based on a slender thread of evidence contained in a short sentence in a time-yellowed letter addressed to Posnikov and later discovered among his personal effects which had lain forgotten for over two centuries in the ancient vaults of the Kremlin Archives in Moscow.