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.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
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
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.
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
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