A Cough for Pavlov

"Saint Ildefonso used to scold me and punish me lots of times. He would sit me on the bare floor and make me eat with the cats of the monastery. These cats were such rascals that they took advantage of my penitence. They drove me mad stealing my choicest morsels. It did no good to chase them away. But I found a way of coping with the beasts in order to enjoy my meals.

"I put them all in a sack, and on a pitch black night took them out under an arch. First I would cough, and then immediately whale the daylights out of the cats. They whined and shrieked like an infernal pipe organ. I would pause for a while and repeat the operation--first a cough, and then a thrashing. I finally noticed that even without beating them, the beasts moaned and yelped like the very devil whenever I coughed. I then let them loose. Thereafter, whenever I had to eat off the floor, I would cast a look around. If an animal approached my food, all I had to do was to cough, and how that cat did scat!"

Thus, in free translation by the University of Connecticut's Professor Jaime H. Arjona, runs a story from El Capellan de la Virgen (The Virgin's Chaplain), reprinted in the current American Psychologist. No clearer exposition of the principle of conditioned reflexes has ever been written. As every Russian schoolboy knows, reflex conditioning was unknown until it was discovered by Russian Physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936). El Capellan de la Virgen, a play about the life of Saint Ildefonso (606-667), Archbishop of Toledo, was written by the Spanish Dramatist Lope de Vega about 1615.

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