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15 results

Stress, Shock, and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century
  • Edited by David Cantor, Edmund Ramsden
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 April 2014
    Print publication:
    20 February 2014
  • 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. 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. 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. David Cantor is Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health. Edmund Ramsden is Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester.

  • 4 - From Primitive Fear to Civilized Stress: Sudden Unexpected Death

  • from Part Two - Trauma and Acute Stress
  • Edited by David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health, Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
  • Book:
    Stress, Shock, and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 April 2014
    Print publication:
    20 February 2014, pp 96-118

  • Summary

    “Voodoo Death.” By this I mean the casting of a fatal spell on a person by a king or priest or voodoo doctor exerting an influence among savage and superstitious people, with the result that the person who is credulous and terrorized by the spell is said to die.

    Walter B. Cannon, 1934

    The sudden and unexpected death of a presumably healthy person in the midst of his accustomed activities is one of the most dramatic and disturbing events in clinical practice and everyday experience. The tragedy is heightened when autopsy examination shows an essentially normal myocardium with minimal disease of the coronary arteries and no evidence of thrombotic occlusion.

    Edmund D. Pellegrino, “Sudden Death”

    Since “voodoo death” can be seen as comparable to our own society's “sudden death,” for which much anecdotal material is complemented by some clinical and pathophysiological assessment, we believe that “voodoo death” does refer to an empirical phenomenon whose complex dimensions are receiving more adequate description…. These noxious effects of belief and expectation have recently been called “nocebo.”

    Robert A. Hahn and Arthur Kleinman, “Belief as Pathogen”

    In 1942 Walter B. Cannon, head of the Department of Physiology at the Harvard Medical School, published his now-famous essay, “‘Voodoo’ Death.” In this study Cannon elucidated the mechanisms responsible for the detrimental physiological effects of “magic” spells or “voodoo” rituals in “primitive” societies.

  • Techniques of the Brain and the Paradox of Emotions, 1880–1930

  • Otniel E. Dror
  • Journal:
    Science in Context / Volume 14 / Issue 4 / December 2001
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    18 December 2002, pp. 643-660
    Print publication:
    December 2001

  • Argument

    This essay studies the convergence of brain research with the physiology of emotions during the early twentieth century. It argues that the brain entered the laboratory of emotions not as an object of knowledge, but as a technique for producing emotions, in spite of the laboratory. The new brain-generated emotion signaled an epistemic break in the nature of studied emotion. It restructured the relationships between physiological and psychological forms of knowledge. It embodied the historical and political concerns of physiologists with pain. And it excluded the affectively experiencing subject from the study of “emotion.” The essay also suggests that the brain-generated emotion was an object suspended in time and abstracted from history. Its unique a-temporal and de-contextualized characteristic transformed emotion into a product of a laboratory whose mode of production mimicked the modern factory. The constitutive elements that were assembled in creating the brain as emotion-generator were instrumental for the important studies of James Papez, Paul MacLean, and for the modern concept of Limbic System.

    The time has come [to]…begin the vivisection of the human heart according to scientific methods.

    Angelo Mosso, 1896