Stress turns 80

   Stress turns 80 in 2016.
   The concept has become one of our modern favourites but it was only coined as a term describing a psychological state by Montreal researcher Hans Selye  in 1936.
  Selye, who was born in Vienna, studied in Prague and moved to Montreal in 1931, was researching some other thing and noticed that rats developed ulcers, heart disease and arthritis after being put in psychologically-challenging situations.
   He invented the term stress because the term strain wasn't quite right.
   It was picked up as a term in many other languages Russian, Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, French and others.

   (The word stress comes from distress and that is said to have been invented around 1,000 years ago but the usage of stress as a psychological term only started with Selye.)
   Selye was the longtime chief of Medicine at the Universite de Montreal.  
   Other universities wanted to woo him away including one in Texas but he said he liked Montreal.
   He wrote 2,000 papers and 39 books, the best known of which as The Stress of Life from 1956 and opened the International Stress Institute in 1977 at age 70.
   He was also a shill for the tobacco industry. (I've always suspected that smoking might be linked to lower-rates of PTSD in the world wars, but that's another story).
  Selye married three times and had five kids in Montreal.
   He died in 1982 and his funeral was held in a church on Laurier.