Medicine: Stress & Strain

Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin,

Mantled in mist, remote from the happy . . .

— The Age of Anxiety, by W. H. Auden

When the physicist wants to ascertain stress, he bows to the memory of Robert Hooke*, measures all the forces involved. and from them calculates the amount of pressure or tension in inanimate matter. up to the breaking point. Doctors have no such easy time of it. Ever since Montreal’s Dr. Hans Selye announced his theory of how stress causes disease through the “general adaptation syndrome” (TIME. Oct. 9, 1950), physicians have recognized that people can get serious illnesses simply from the “stress” put on the system by emotional pressures, shock, physical fatigue, or even bad eating habits. But the exact causes and effects of stress, and how it works on different subjects, are still matters of tantalizing speculation.

In their January issue, the editors of Britain’s 86-year-old medical journal, The Practitioner, have tried to cram the available information on stress and its medical importance into an 80-page nutshell. The experts reporting on stress include Dr. Selye himself, specialists in rheumatic diseases, heart diseases and psychiatry, and the Rt. Rev. William Greer, Anglican Bishop of Manchester, who reports that stress can have spiritual as well as temporal origins.

Sugar & Wall Street Worries. The stress diseases are a fast-growing modern problem. As famed Surgeon Sir Heneage Ogilvie puts it, “They are a problem of the so-called civilized races . . . They are diseases of young people, but of people old enough to have undertaken responsibility . . . yet not old enough to have won through or given up the struggle —say of people between the ages of 14 and 40. They are diseases of educated people, or rather of people who think, which is by no means the same thing.”

A child may get stomach cramps before a school examination. A housewife develops rheumatoid arthritis worrying over her relationship with her husband. A soldier cracks under the strain of waiting for battle. All these are stress diseases. So, in various cases, are asthma, duodenal ulcers, hypertension, some heart diseases and ulcerative colitis. “Some,” says Surgeon Ogilvie, “would add diabetes in younger many men and women have been freed from the fetters of anxiety and self-absorption.”

Surgeon Ogilvie, while partially conceding the bishop’s point, offers a remedy equally possible for Buddhists and freethinkers. His solution to the high toll of modern stress: leisure. Said he: “If we cannot relieve stress, we must break it somewhere in the chain . . . Only leisure can rehabilitate the overstressed mechanism of the mind . . .” But mere idleness is not the answer. The kind of leisure men need in a machine-age civilization is rather some spare-time task or occupation “that makes some call on their intelligence and restores their self-respect, transforming them once more from cogs in a machine to men among men.”

Robert Hooke, a 17th century British scientist-of-all-trades, first announced the formula that stress set up within an elastic body is proportional to the strain to which the body is subjected by an applied load. He also partially anticipated Newton’s law of gravity, published original discoveries about fossils and the rotation of the planet Jupiter, invented the double barometer and the universal joint, and worked out a practical system of semaphore telegraphy.