When Montreal's Hans Selye, world's leading expert on stress, was felled by stress of Quebec taxes

   Of all the rock star-status original thinkers Montreal has known, few surpass Hans Selye, who was best known for inventing the concept of stress.

Selye's adages about stress are still cited frequently.
• It's not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it. 
• Stress is the spice of life. Both good and harmful stress use up the body's adaptive energy. 

• A mother's physical reactions are the same when she hears her son has fallen in battle as when she hears later the first report was a mistake and that he is alive and well after all. The toll on her vital energy is the same.
• People could live past 100 by understanding and conquering stress, by taking it in our hands and examining its chemical and psychological properties. Stress has got such properties, and they can be measured.
• The caveman didn't have to worry about the stock market or the atomic bomb but the caveman worried about being eaten by a bear while he was asleep, or about dying of hunger. It's not that people suffer more stress today. It's just that they think they do. 

   Selye, who taught at the Universite de Montreal, died at the age of 75 in 1982.
   The sress of dealing with the government might've killed him.
   Selye had been embattled in a protracted battle with Revenue Quebec, which claimed he owed $290,000 for the yeras 1974 to 1977, at least according to totals in October 1981.
   They claimed that the cash was owed from his International Institute of Stress, which he ran from his home at 659 Milton. (Some of that revenue came from tobacco companies, which generously funded his research, but that's a story for another day).
   Government agents seized eight boxes of documents from his offices in October 1981, including some that went back as far as 1945.
   Selye was so traumatized that he was unable speak for several days.*
   In May 1982 Selye launched a lawsuit against Revenue Quebec for violating his home, as a violation of his charter rights. He died five months later.

    His widow Louise Devrel-Selye blamed the government for his death and attempted to sue them for $700,000. Survivors include children Catherine, Michel, Jean, Marie and Andre who has since passed away. His wife Gabrielle died aged 98 in May 2017.

*La Presse 22 May 1982.