Hans Selye

Hans Selye was a Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist, born in Vienna, who spent his career at Johns Hopkins University, McGill University and the Universite de Montreal researching how the body responds to stress. He identified that a wide range of harmful agents produce an identical, non-specific physiological response, work he called the general adaptation syndrome, and in doing so coined and popularized the medical use of the word stress. His 1956 book The Stress of Life brought these ideas to a general audience and shaped later thinking about stress in both medicine and popular psychology; he was nominated seventeen times for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine but never received it, and became a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1968.