Stress
Perspectives
Historical keywords
Stress
Stress will be a familiar concept to most modern medical workers. Its widespread use reflects the ambiguity of the term: stress can refer to mental or physical states, minor irritants, life crises, verbal emphases, or problematic forces in engineering and dentistry. These many meanings, moreover, support a rich range of metaphorical associations. Doctors and patients complain of being under pressure; of having workloads that place them at breaking point; of being worn down by their environments and needing structures or networks of support.
Stress derives from the Latin verb, stringo (stringere) meaning to bind or draw tight, but also to graze, touch, pluck, or prune. It entered the English language in the
14th century as a modified form of distress or distrain. In its early uses it referred to a physical hardship or trial, but by the 16th century it also indicated a form of physical injury. In these early uses, stress was seen as a unpleasant condition of the environment rather than of the individual. It was not until the 17th century that the word began to refer to an inner state.
The modern understanding of stress, which sees it as a combination of external forces and internal responses, only appears in the 19th century. William Shaw Mason in his Statistical Account of Ireland (1814–19) recounted how many of the poor “particularly females, die in their youth, of what they call stresses, that is violent heats from hard work”. This model, which combined toxic environmental pressures and pathological physiological response, was later resurrected in 20th-century research, most famously in the work of the Czech-Canadian biochemist, Hans Selye (1907–82).
The idea that the body’s response to environmental conditions might have long-term consequences had been proposed by William Osler (1849–1919). In 1934,
Walter B Cannon (1871–1945) provided experimental evidence of this process when he showed
Historical keywords
Stress
Stress will be a familiar concept to most modern medical workers. Its widespread use reflects the ambiguity of the term: stress can refer to mental or physical states, minor irritants, life crises, verbal emphases, or problematic forces in engineering and dentistry. These many meanings, moreover, support a rich range of metaphorical associations. Doctors and patients complain of being under pressure; of having workloads that place them at breaking point; of being worn down by their environments and needing structures or networks of support.
Stress derives from the Latin verb, stringo (stringere) meaning to bind or draw tight, but also to graze, touch, pluck, or prune. It entered the English language in the
14th century as a modified form of distress or distrain. In its early uses it referred to a physical hardship or trial, but by the 16th century it also indicated a form of physical injury. In these early uses, stress was seen as a unpleasant condition of the environment rather than of the individual. It was not until the 17th century that the word began to refer to an inner state.
The modern understanding of stress, which sees it as a combination of external forces and internal responses, only appears in the 19th century. William Shaw Mason in his Statistical Account of Ireland (1814–19) recounted how many of the poor “particularly females, die in their youth, of what they call stresses, that is violent heats from hard work”. This model, which combined toxic environmental pressures and pathological physiological response, was later resurrected in 20th-century research, most famously in the work of the Czech-Canadian biochemist, Hans Selye (1907–82).
The idea that the body’s response to environmental conditions might have long-term consequences had been proposed by William Osler (1849–1919). In 1934,
Walter B Cannon (1871–1945) provided experimental evidence of this process when he showed