The paper focuses on the major epistemological shifts that the relationship between medicine and politicis in the first decade of Communist rule in Romania. Under the authority of the Pavlovian principles promoted by High Stalinism, the 1950s in Romanian medicine were generally marked by Pavlov’s teaching on “theory of higher nervous activity” and of dynamic localization of brain’s functions, providing a strong pathological physiology for discussing and treating mental illness in recurrent terms as “protective inhibition”, “sleep therapy”, “stimulative therapy”. Inspired not only by Pavlov, but also by the works of I.M. Secenov, S.S. Korsakov or V.M. Bechterev, Romanian medicine in general, psychiatry, neurology and physiology in particular were subsumed to neurology and psychopatology and was redefined as a branch of natural sciences. Simultaneously, the ‘50s were characterized by a denunciation of the “bourgeois” idealistic and decadent medical concepts and practices, “psychomorphology”, “psychoanalysis” and “existential psychology” being particularly demonized.

This Pavlovian “break” in medicine created the opportunity for doctors to accede to new resources of research and higher professional status. Taking advantage by the new opportunities of medical research created in Romania after the Second World War by the communist rulers, leading interwar scientists (Parhon, Danielopolu, Kernbach) hurried to prove their loyalty towards the emerging communist regime in the country, and were ready to publicly reinterpret their work in Pavlovian terms. The paper deals with two scientific congresses discussing the Pavlovian reinterpretation of the history of Romanian medicine and future perspectives organized by the Romanian Academy in 1952, 1956 respectively. The research argues that the enthusiasm Romanian doctors showed in openly embracing the Pavlovian principles is to be understood instrumentally for getting access to new professional and symbolic resources.