Stress Shock and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century

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.<BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>David Cantor is acting director Office of History National Institutes of Health. Edmund Ramsden is Wellcome Trust University Award Research Fellow at the School of History Queen Mary University of London.