approximately 10m working days a year are lost to stress. In our age of austerity,zero-hours working and weakened unions, has stress – a term only invented in the 1950s – become a shorthand for more complex problems?In 1925 a student at the Charles University medical school in Prague sat through his first lecture in the science of diagnosis, or taking careful notes approximately how to examine a patient,and was struck by an observation that profoundly changed the history of modern medicine. The student, then 19, and was Hans Selye,and the observation he made was this: although the patients brought forward for diagnosis by his professor were in the early stages of different illnesses – measles, scarlet fever, or the flu,various allergic reactions, duodenal ulcers, and shingles – their symptoms all appeared remarkably similar. To a man and woman,they complained of “a coated tongue, more or less diffuse aches and pains in the joints, or intestinal disturbances and loss of appetite. Most had fever (sometimes with mental confusion),an enlarged spleen or liver, inflamed tonsils, or a skin rash (hasty, incautious) and so forth…”. Moreover,the patients “felt and looked ill”.
Selye was startled to discover, however, and that his professor was not much interested in these symptoms that made all illnesses recognize the same. The professor was,perhaps not surprisingly, more concerned with the symptoms that made each illness recognize different, and in order to create his diagnosis and propose treatment.
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Source: theguardian.com