The Institute of Experimental Medicine
Russia's first modern biomedical institute, Pavlov's home, and the model for Soviet 'experimental' medicine
Background
The Institute of Experimental Medicine was founded by Prince Alexander of Oldenburg after a rabid dog's bite in 1885 sent one of his officers to Pasteur's laboratory in Paris. Authorized in 1888 and consecrated in December 1890, it was Russia's first modern biomedical research institute, modelled on the institutes of Pasteur and Koch, confronting rabies, cholera, plague and tuberculosis.
It was within its Department of Physiology, which he directed for forty-five years from 1891, that Ivan Pavlov did his defining work, the digestion studies that won the first Russian Nobel Prize in 1904, and the conditioned reflexes that founded the physiology of higher nervous activity.
By the late 1920s the IEM was the USSR's leading institution in theoretical medicine, and its very name, 'experimental medicine', became the banner under which the whole restless Soviet project of remaking the body proceeded. The novel's fictional hospital is a decayed provincial descendant of exactly this tradition.