"To Find Meaning in Randomness"

"Hans Selye, a Czech physician and biochemist at the University of Montreal, took these ideas further, introducing the term 'stress' (borrowed from metallurgy) to describe the way trauma caused overactivity of the adrenal gland, and with it a disruption of bodily equilibrium. In the most extreme case, Selye argued, stress could wear down the body’s adaptation mechanisms, resulting in death. His narrative fit well into the cultural discourse of the cold-war era, where, Harrington writes, many saw themselves as 'broken by modern life.' Selye’s ideas, in her view, were 'especially appealing to people who knew they felt worried or unwell, but were perhaps no longer quite persuaded by the doctrine of bad nerves that had helped their parents and grandparents make sense of their experiences of malaise.'
"Selye’s work prompted further research on the impact of family dynamics, interpersonal relationships and community ties on health. Most of this work initially focused on the heart and hypertension, prominent in the public mind following President Eisenhower’s cardiac crisis. Later, scrutiny was extended to the emotional dimensions of the other great specter of the time, cancer. If stress lay at the root of so many modern maladies, Harrington writes, then 'healing ties' might be the prophylactic, if not the cure, for cancer as well."

Jerome Groopman reviews Anne Harrington's The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine in The New York Times.