Hans (Hugo Bruno) Selye - Works, Other media
Physician, born in Vienna, Austria. He studied in Prague, Paris, and Rome before emigrating to North America in the 1930s. After a decade at McGill University in Montreal (193345), he became director of the Institute for Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the French-language University of Montreal (1945). He was best known for his stress-general adaptation syndrome, an attempt to link stress and anxiety and their biochemical and physiological consequences to many modern human disorders.
Hans Hugo Bruno Selye CC (Selye János, Vienna, January 26, 1907 - Montreal, October 16, 1982) was a Canadian endocrinologist of Austro-Hungarian origin. He did much important theoretical work on the non-specific response of the organism to stress. Some commentators considered him the first to demonstrate the existence of a separate stress disease, the stress syndrome, or general adaptation syndrome (GAS). Closely linked to the idea of adaptation is the concept of Integration, biological systems gaining integrated responses (ie cells acting in concert) though chemicals (hormones) and nerves (autonomic {sympathetic/parasympathetic}, central nervous system, reflex arcs, and... He later coined the term "stress", which has been accepted into the lexicon of various other languages. Although Selye claimed to have coined the term "stress", it should rightly be attributed to Walter Cannon, according to Robert Sapolsky. Selye in the preface to 'STRESS', gives a couple of nods to Clade Bernard (developed the idea of 'millieau interior') and Walter Cannon's 'homeostasis' (here the idea of feedback is implicit if not explicit[?] and the idea of stress as an activating mechanism in all life capable of activation. Thus a cell sits content till a stressor ie danger or appetite, external or Internal stress activates mechanisms leading to an Adaptation to circumstance. up to Play { which prepares the safe animal for serious activity} ) Selye conceptualized the physiology of stress as having two components: a set of responses he called the general adaptation syndrome;
To grossly oversimplify to the point of circular argument, Selye discovered and documented that stress differs from other physical responses in that stress is stressful whether the one receives good or bad news, whether the impulse is positive or negative. He called negative stress distress and positive stress eustress. The system whereby the body copes with stress, the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal system, was also first described by Selye. Later he developed the idea of two 'reservoirs' of stress resistance or alternatively stress energy (which might be compared to Qi). One might infer an ethic whereby an ill (including psycho and socio disease) person should do everything to reduce stress (sometimes this appears as attachments to minor anxieties to mask deeper ones) but in one's strength the taking on of challenges.
He wrote Stress without Distress (1974), The Stress of Life (1956), and From dream to discovery; Seen in the round Selye's contribution is one of the 20th centuries greatest ideas, along with info and systems theory (which have staggering biological implications) and Heisenberg remembering that his existence was part of observation (thus harkening back to the Delphic Oracle's, " know thyself ". After Selye sociobiology made some extraordinary observations relating to integration of baboon troops (etc) which are compelling evidence that the unit of being is Not the individual but the tribe, troop, etc. )
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