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City University of New York (CUNY)
Anxiety; Chronic Disease; Medical Market; Pharmaceutical; Public Health; Stress
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The Medicalization Of Stress: Hans Selye And The Transformation Of The Postwar Medical Marketplace, Vanessa L. Burrows
The Medicalization Of Stress: Hans Selye And The Transformation Of The Postwar Medical Marketplace, Vanessa L. Burrows
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation employs historical methodology and public health theory to examine how critical changes in the culture and political economy of biomedical research shaped Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye's concept of biological stress, guiding him to develop a highly individualistic and commercially-appealing disease model that complimented major interests of the postwar medical marketplace: the state, the corporation and the consumer. In the mid-1930s Selye proposed that the human body adapted to a diverse range of stressors--including, extreme temperatures, intoxification, surgical trauma, physical exercise and complete immobilization--by releasing adrenocortical hormones to regulate bodily functions. For the next fifty years he devoted his …