It might be the most overused diagnosis of our times, a catch-all culprit for a host of ailments, big and small. ‘I'm so stressed’, is something we hear all the time. When I suffered from an attack of shingles, stress of an unspecified nature was blamed as the trigger. The ups and downs in my blood sugar levels – checked rather regularly as I am diabetic – have been attributed to stress or the alleviation thereof. Perhaps the most bizarre case that I've encountered was the case of a little girl whose alopecia – massive hair loss – was attributed by doctors to … you got it, stress! (I use the word ‘bizarre’ advisedly, for the young lady in question was all of three years old, raised in a secure home with parents who lavished their love and attention upon her). Given these personal experiences I was not unduly shocked by the claim that stress is perhaps ‘the most widely utilized medical concept in contemporary constructions and expressions of personal identity, the built environment, and the complexities of the competitive capitalist economy’ (p. 2, original emphasis).

How stress achieved its current status and made its way into our daily vocabulary is one of the recurring topics that are visited, if not elaborated upon explicitly, in the different chapters of Stress, Shock, and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century. Born out of a workshop of nearly the same title – the word ‘shock’ replaced ‘trauma’ in the initial title – held at the National Institutes of Health in 2010, this edited volume features a dozen essays by historians and anthropologists offering multiple perspectives on the place of stress in modernity.

Despite its ubiquity in our daily language today, stress and the consequent adaptation to it have not received much scholarly attention from historians of medicine and science until now. Perhaps one reason is that they are relatively new additions to the medical lexicon, only introduced in their ‘modern biological formulation’ after the publication of a brief essay by Hans Selye in 1936 (p. 22). But, as many of the authors in this book have argued, the stress concept has a much deeper history, with antecedents in other types of diagnosis such as nervousness and neurosis, and indeed ‘drew on a myriad of different developments and origins, including psychosomatic medicine, research on adaptation and energy, nineteenth-century neurasthenia’ (p. 112). The ways in which these disparate concepts have come to be displaced by stress is one of the strongest threads that tie together many of the essays here.

Though not arranged in a strictly chronological fashion, the book retains a sense of historical flow through the twentieth century by the organization of its chapters, which are divided into six thematic sections of two each. Mark Jackson begins, aptly enough, with a historical essay on the origin of the field, arguing for a more ‘measured historical reflection’ upon Selye's role, who has been alternately glorified or altogether sidelined by different stress researchers (p. 21). This chapter, along with Watkins's piece on the entry of stress into the American vernacular, comprises the section on ‘packaging’ stress. The ‘trauma’ (or shock) in the title is featured in the pair of studies offered in the second section, and the roles of war and the workplace in the articulation and recognition of stress are covered in two following sections. The final two sections focus more on the methodologies employed by stress researchers, through the vehicles of stress management and surveillance respectively.

One of the great values of this book is the heterogeneity of its individual offerings; the authors have come to the subject from different backgrounds and therefore study stress in different geographical, disciplinary and institutional contexts. Thus, in addition to the perhaps more familiar cases of PTSD, as mentioned earlier, and cancer (by Cantor) in the US and Great Britain, we also learn about workplace stress in contemporary Japan, where the medical condition of depression came to be conceptualized as a product of stress from overwork. Robert Kirk shifts the focus altogether from humans to animals as the sufferers of stress, and shows us how articulations of the stress concept played a role in government regulation of animal research in Great Britain. Clearly this is a book by scholars for other scholars rather than a go-to resource for ‘everything you wanted to know about stress but were afraid to ask’. As the first serious scholarly work on the subject, Stress, Shock, and Adaptation is a timely and valuable contribution to gaining some historical perspective on the sociocultural dimensions of one of the most widely touted diagnoses of our times.