Medicine: The Life of Stress

The experiment seemed to be a dismal failure. The young researcher at Montreal’s McGill University had been injecting ovarian hormone extracts into rats, hoping to find evidences of a new hormone. Instead, after careful autopsies, he found only evidences of poisoning such as he got with injections of substances picked at random from the laboratory shelves. The rats’ adrenal glands were enlarged, the thymus wasted away and the stomach ulcerated. Dr. Hans Selye concluded sadly that he had been wasting his time. Then it struck him: none of the substances which he had injected had directly caused death, but all had caused an unbearable stress or strain on the rats’ systems. Stress was what had killed the rats.

As is so often the case, a momentous discovery had been made by accident. Last week, 14 years after his bittersweet experiment, Dr. Selye returned to Montreal after a triumphal tour of the medical capitals of Europe and the Americas. He had given countless lectures on his theory of stress and collected a hatful of medals and awards. Still young (43) and eager, he plunged back into the studies of stress and hormones which he expects will keep him busy the rest of his life.

Built-in Regulator. Hans Selye (rhymes with tell yea) was born in Vienna and took his M.D. and Ph.D. at Prague. Soon he settled at McGill to teach biochemistry, and added a D.Sc. there. In 1945 he switched to the University of Montreal. His 1936 paper on stress, as the cause of death in his experimental rats, attracted no more attention than Alexander Fleming’s first report of penicillin—and it may prove no less important to suffering mankind.

Man, like the animals, has a built-in mechanism of infinite complexity and delicacy to help him adapt himself to hunger, heat, cold, exhaustion or terror. Normally the mechanism is self-regulating (like a heating plant with a thermostat). But sometimes, Selye says, it gets out of kilter. Then the body either overdoes the job of adapting itself to stress, underdoes it, or simply does it wrong. What follows may be disease or even death. Doubtless this has always been true, but it seems to be happening oftener now that man has built himself a civilization which subjects his old-fashioned system to stresses & strains for which it was never designed.

Shock & Counter-Shock. Selye has coined the forbidding name “general adaptation syndrome” for what happens when the system is subjected to overall stress. It begins, he holds, with an alarm reaction. The first phase is shock, in which body temperature and blood pressure fall, along with blood salt and blood sugar. The shock phase may last from a few minutes to 24 hours. Even before it ends, the system begins to mobilize for counter-shock: the pituitary sends more ACTH flooding to the adrenals, where it boosts the output of adrenal hormones. Blood pressure, blood salt and blood sugar increase and the temperature often rises.

Having mobilized the defense forces of the body, the alarm reaction is followed by a stage of increased resistance to whatever stress caused the alarm. For example, a man whose nerves have been frazzled by incessant hammering reaches a point where he seems not to notice it. But it has taken its toll: if he is subjected to another abnormal stress, he has far less resistance to meet the new threat.

Finally, even resistance wears out. Then the system reaches the stage of exhaustion. This was what Dr. Selye had found in his rats in 1936, shown by enlarged and overactive adrenals, wasted thymus and bleeding ulcers. But exhaustion, the last phase, may produce many other “diseases of adaptation,” notably some types of high blood pressure, several kidney diseases, rheumatoid and gouty arthritis.

“Finger Exercises.” Long before Hench and Kendall showed the near-miraculous power of ACTH and cortisone to reverse the course of rheumatoid arthritis (TIME, May 2, 1949), Dr. Selye had outlined the theory into which their facts fitted so neatly. He has become the world’s outstanding expert on the endocrine glands—though many dispute some aspects of his theories and some question his methods.

Lean, lithe Dr. Selye has a seemingly inexhaustible fund of energy. His six-volume Encyclopedia of Endocrinology, which took 15 years to compile, he dismisses as “finger exercises.” To date, little of his theory has been translated into the practice of healing. But he believes that a “whole new branch of medicine is opening up” and intends to devote his life to “this limitless field.” He has hopes that specialists in stress will be able to catch up with—and eventually get ahead of—the stresses of civilization.