These days, The medical profession Takes
stress seriously—as countless studies on the effects
of stress indicate it should. But that has not always
been the case. Though human beings have always
felt stress, it’s actually been less than a century since
the subject began getting the attention it deserves.
As TIME explained in a 1983 cover story, it used
to be thought that “stress” was just a vague feeling,
not a term precise enough to have real medical use-
fulness. There was no firm definition or way of mea-
suring it. Even so, it was clear that there was some-
thing going on. As early as the Civil War, a condition
known as “soldier’s heart” was noticed by doctors.
“During World War I, the crippling anxiety called
shell shock was at first attributed to the vibrations
from heavy artillery, which was believed to damage
blood vessels in the brain,” as TIME put it. “This the-
ory was abandoned by the time World War II came
along, and the problem was renamed battle fatigue.”
What earlier doctors studying soldiers had missed
was that the long-term activation of the famed fight-
or-flight response could cause problems that would
endure even in times of peace. That thinking began
to change thanks in large part to Hans Selye, the
“ father of stress research.”
Selye was a medical researcher in Montreal study-
ing hormonal changes in rats when, in the 1930s, he
realized that something was going wrong in his ex-
periments. He was trying to track the effects of an in-
jection of a particular hormone, but it didn’t seem to
matter what he stuck the rodents with. Yes, the rats
showed signs of being affected (autopsies revealed
that their adrenal glands were swollen, for example),
but there was no way to link those changes to the
specific hormones he was giving them. That’s when
Selye—who had also noticed that some patients he’d
seen as a medical student seemed simply “sick” in
a way that wasn’t necessarily linked to a specific
disease—had an important realization: the rodents
he was studying were responding not merely to his
injections of hormones and placebos but also to the
stress caused by the experiment.
“His 1936 paper on stress, as the cause of death
in his experimental rats, attracted no more attention
than Alexander Fleming’s first report of penicillin—
and it may prove no less important to suffering man-
kind,” TIME noted in 1950, by which point his con-
tinuing work had earned him renown in the field.
Selye theorized that overexposing the body to stress
would cause what he called “general adaptation
syndrome.” The idea was that the body would re-
spond to a lasting stress the same way it would to
a brief shock, but when the shock didn’t dissipate,
the body would become inured to its cause. Though
that might seem advantageous for daily life, it took
its toll; when a new, different shock came around,
the body would be less able to summon the necessary
reaction. The eventual result was exhaustion and re-
lated medical conditions, such as high blood pres-
sure. Far from being limited to soldiers, the range of
potential sufferers included all of humanity.
At that time, Selye was known to his colleagues,
but his discoveries had yet to trickle down to patients.
Still, he said he believed that a “whole new branch of
medicine [was] opening up” and that stress would get
the specialized attention it deserved. Sure enough,
as the decade progressed, stress-related diseases
were increasingly the subject of concern and study.
Researchers dedicated themselves to learning how
exactly stress worked and, while attempting to find
medical treatments for its causes and effects, began
to recommend leisure to their patients as a self-helpTHE DOCTOR
WHO
CHANGED
THE WAY WE
THINK ABOUT
STRESS
Hans Selye pioneered the study
of stress and its effects, both
negative and positive