Ilya Faddeyevich Cyon

CYON, Ilya Faddeyevich (1842–1912), a prominent Russian physiologist. He studied in Warsaw, Kiev, and Berlin (1858–64). He received his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1865 in St. Petersburg. He was a privat-docent and later a professor at St. Petersburg University. Cyon's entry into the Medical-Surgical Academy following the forced departure of I. M. Sechenov was accompanied by opposition from a portion of the faculty and the student body due to Cyon's reactionary views. After student demonstrations directed specifically against Cyon, he was forced to cease teaching at the university and the Medical-Surgical Academy. His polemic with "Otechestvennye Zapiski," headed by Nekrasov, also dates to this time. At the invitation of Claude Bernard, Cyon moved to Paris, where he continued to engage in physiology. However, little by little, his interests shifted to the sphere of financial and journalistic issues; he became an agent of the Russian Ministry of Finance in Paris, but soon (in 1891) he stood in opposition to the leaders of the ministry, published journalistic pamphlets of a reactionary-patriotic nature, and generally attempted to play a major political role. After Cyon refused to return to Russia to provide explanations regarding pamphlets directed against Minister Vyshnegradsky and others, he was officially exiled from his homeland and deprived of his civil rights. In the first period of his activity, when Cyon was engaged in physiology, he proved himself an outstanding educator and experimenter. In particular, one of his students was Academician I. P. Pavlov, who, together with M. Afanasyev and under the guidance of Cyon, conducted work on the nerves of the pancreas. Cyon made a number of major discoveries: for example, together with the famous German physiologist C. Ludwig, he discovered the n. depressor (prize of the Paris Academy of Sciences, 1868), the vasomotor action of the nn. splanchnici (prize of the same academy, 1876), and the accelerator nerves of the heart (nn. accelerantes); he studied the role of the liver in the synthesis of urea and lipoids, and found nerve endings in the peritoneum, etc. Among Cyon's printed works, one should note the first original textbook on physiology in the Russian language (St. Petersburg, 1873), a two-volume summary of vivisectional and experimental methods of physiological research (Leipzig, 1876), and "Gesammelte Werke" (collected works).