Vladimir Bekhterev

Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev (1857 to 1927) was a Russian neurologist who is called the father of objective psychology. Born in a village of the Vyatka Governorate, he studied at the Military Medical Academy and the Medicosurgical Academy in St. Petersburg, where his interest in neuropathology and psychiatry began. He is best known for noting the role of the hippocampus in memory, for his study of reflexes, and for Bekhterev's disease, the condition now also called ankylosing spondylitis, which he identified while researching at the University of Kazan. His competition with Ivan Pavlov over the study of conditioned reflexes is part of the history of Russian physiology and psychology. He died suddenly in 1927 shortly after diagnosing Joseph Stalin, and rumours that he died on Stalin's orders remain disputed among scholars for lack of direct evidence. This entry records what he held and what was disputed; it is not medical advice.