Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

14 results

Stress, Shock, and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century
  • Edited by David Cantor, Edmund Ramsden
  • With contributions by Theodore M. Brown , Otniel E. Dror , Rhodri Hayward , Mark Jackson , Robert G. W. Kirk , Junko Kitanaka , Tulley Long , Joseph Melling , Elizabeth Siegel Watkins and Allan Young
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 April 2014
    Print publication:
    20 February 2014
  • 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.

  • 2 - Stress and the American Vernacular: Popular Perceptions of Disease Causality

  • from Part One - Packaging Stress
  • 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
  • With contributions by Theodore M. Brown , Otniel E. Dror , Rhodri Hayward , Mark Jackson , Robert G. W. Kirk , Junko Kitanaka , Tulley Long , Joseph Melling , Elizabeth Siegel Watkins and Allan Young
  • Book:
    Stress, Shock, and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 April 2014
    Print publication:
    20 February 2014, pp 49-70

  • Summary

    FASEB Journal, the journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, is a well-known scholarly publication dedicated to the experimental biological and biomedical sciences. It publishes highly technical reports of the latest results of research on molecular and cellular physiology, immunology, and the like. It may thus have come as somewhat of a surprise to subscribers to find Paris Hilton as the subject of an editorial in the September 2007 issue. The journal's editor in chief used his monthly editorial space to trace the lineage of stress from Hans Selye to Paris Hilton. Hans Selye is, of course, the experimental scientist considered to be the father of the stress concept in physiology. Paris Hilton is, of course, the heiress-socialite whose dalliances and antics fill the pages of tabloid newspapers. She caught the attention of the editor in chief of FASEB Journal in May 2007 because a Boston Globe article reported her to be under such stress prior to her upcoming incarceration that she was unable to eat. As he quipped in the editorial, “Since her stress preceded the trauma, Paris Hilton may be the first well-documented case of ‘Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.’”

    I begin with this story because it nicely encapsulates the interplay between professional and popular discourse in constructing the public understanding of the biomedical concept of stress. This chapter investigates when, how, and why stress entered the American vernacular.