HAMBURG 247intervening decades. Research on stress in humans has developed a large
body of evidence showing that anticipation of personal injury may lead
to important changes not only in thought, feeling, and action, but also
in endocrine and autonomic processes and, hence, in a wide variety of
visceral functions. We established research on these problems at the
NIH in 1958, following up on some earlier work that I had done else
where. We were fortunate to attract superb collaborators, including
William Bunney, James Maas, Joseph Handlon, Francis Board, Ralph
Wadeson, John Davis, and Fredric Solomon, about whom I will des
cribe more later in this essay.
We also had a strong collaboration with the Division of Neuropsy
chiatry at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, headed by an
extraordinary person, David McKenzie Rioch. In the Walter Reed
Neuroendocrine Laboratory that I had helped David Rioch establish
during the Korean War in the early 1950s, we had wonderful collabora
tions with John Mason, Edward Sachar, and Robert Rose, among others.
They were major collaborators and went on to do very important work
in the field afterwards.
Much work in this field has centered on adrenocortical function in
association with emotional distress. Investigators have generally found
the adrenal gland to be stimulated by the pituitary and, in turn, by the
brain under environmental conditions perceived as threatening to a per
son. It has been possible to correlate systematically the extent of emotional
distress with the adrenal hormone levels in blood and urine, each assess
ed independently.
Work in this field profited greatly from the development of pre
cise, reliable biochemical methods for measuring hormones and related
compounds. They were new at the time. When I started out in the late
1940s and early 1950s, we had to get by with bioassays, which were
helpful, but not nearly as good as the various biochemical methods that
were more precise and reliable; they came along later.
Since then, many hundreds of persons have been studied in various
laboratories all over the world under conditions of moderately intense
or severe distress. The results are consistent, showing a significant eleva
tion of adrenocortical hormones in blood and urine compared with
the levels recorded under non-distress conditions. Moreover, many of the