1 - Evaluating the Role of Hans Selye in the Modern History of Stress

Summary

This is the philosophical point of view which alters our concept of disease…. Medical men who recognize the revolutionary and shattering nature of these developments realize that a great adjustment in our thinking has to be made. Here is the pool of Bethesda.

J. S. L. Browne, “New Pool of Bethesda”

Some years ago, Hans Selye postulated a general adaptation syndrome due to stress, but this concept has been of doubtful value in advancing the understanding of maladies.

John W. Todd, “Plain Words in Medicine”

According to many stress researchers, as well as historians, modern biological formulations of stress can be traced back to a brief and rather speculative article written by the Austrian-born Hungarian scientist Hans Selye (1907–82) in 1936. The article set out what appeared to be a characteristic triphasic pattern of nonspecific physiological responses to injury: the “general adaptation syndrome” comprised an initial alarm phase that was followed by a stage of resistance or adaptation, leading eventually to a stage of exhaustion and death. Within traditional narratives of stress history, which have often been written by researchers themselves and which portray the origins and development of scientfic understandings of stress as relatively unproblematic and progressive, it was the general adaptation syndrome, or what Selye sometimes referred to rather ostentatiously as “Selye's syndrome,” that provided a conceptual framework for Selye and his colleagues to develop a complex neurohormonal model of stress that implicated pituitary and adrenal function in the etiology of many chronic diseases, such as hypertension, peptic ulceration, renal disease, arthritis, asthma, and cancer.