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The modern concept of stress is commonly traced to the physiologist, Hans Selye. Selye viewed stress as a physiological response to a significant or unexpected change, describing a series of stages: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion, when an organism's adaptive mechanisms finally failed. While Selye originally focused on nonspecific physiological responses to harmful agents, the stress concept has since been used to examine the relationship between a variety of environmental stressors and mental disorders and chronic organic diseases such as hypertension, gastric ulcers, arthritis, allergies, and cancer. This edited volume brings together leading scholars to explore the emergence and development of the stress concept and its ever-changing definitions. It examines how the concept has been used to connect disciplines such as ecology, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, public health, urban planning, architecture, and a range of social sciences; its application in a variety of sites such as the battlefield, workplace, clinic, hospital, and home; and the emergence of techniques of stress management in a variety of different socio-cultural and scientific locations. Contributors: Theodore M. Brown, David Cantor, Otniel E. Dror, Rhodri Hayward, Mark Jackson, Robert G. W. Kirk, Junko Kitanaka, Tulley Long, Joseph Melling, Edmund Ramsden, Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, Allan Young. David Cantor is Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health. Edmund Ramsden is Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester.
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
During World War II the US miliatry launched an extensive initiative aimed at fighting the debilitating phenomenon of combat stress in its ranks. Even after the war, however, as Cold War tensions threatened to erupt in Korea, the prevention of soldier breakdown due to the psychological or emotional pressures of combat continued to present an urgent problem, and the military was keen to draw on any available tool to increase the effectiveness of soldiers on the battlefield. While psychology and psychiatry had provided certain insights during World War II on how morale and leadership could help to mitigate soldier failure, the 1940s had wrought another route for investigating and solving the problem of combat stress in the form of new physiological knowledge about the role of the pituitary and adrenal hormones in responding to stress. In the early 1950s stress research within the military context sought to mobilize the most recent laboratory studies on endocrine stress responses and integrate them with the knowledge gained by military psychiatrists, all in the effort to keep their soldiers in top fighting form and, ultimately, ensure American security in an uncertain time.
The present chapter seeks to explore more deeply how the physiological concept of the stress response became constitutive of combat-stress studies by analyzing three episodes from military stress research in the 1950s: the 1952 Study of Combat Stress in Korea from the Johns Hopkins University's Operations Research Office; the 1953 Symposium on Stress held at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center; and the “psychoendocrine” research of the physiologist John W. Mason and the psychologist Joseph V. Brady at Walter Reed's Division of Neuropsychiatry.
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester