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Mathew Thomson, Mark Jackson, The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability, Social History of Medicine, Volume 27, Issue 3, August 2014, Pages 607–609, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hku021
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Another England cricket player withdraws from the fray on account of ‘stress’. What does this mean? I ask my kids to do something they don't fancy, and their knee-jerk reaction is to accuse me of being ‘stressy’. Perhaps I am feeling stressed? Are you feeling stressed too? In stress, we seem to have found a condition and a language that we feel comfortable with, or perhaps can't escape even if we don't, and which occupies the broadsheets, the home, and the workplace; yet at the same time, I'm not sure whether we all really understand what this term means. The recent phenomenon is an issue that has already attracted the attention of journalists. There is also some preliminary work by historians who have homed in on the founding father of stress, Hans Selye, but we haven't had the major historical study that offers us the big picture that the subject deserves. Mark Jackson's The Age of Stress, as the bold title suggests, is that study. Covering the period from the late nineteenth century to the present, and international in its scope, it is a substantial, ambitious, and impressive piece of work. Jackson argues that stress is the emblematic medical but also cultural condition, not just of our own age, but of modern times. In doing so, he juxtaposes a carefully told story of how medical science developed a theory of stress to make sense of keeping bodies and minds in healthy balance, with a story of how stress as a metaphor came to be deployed in popular culture and in thinking about political stability, economic security, and even the harmony of the cosmos.
