Selye

But a chance meeting with Hans Selye, an expert on the body’s reaction to stress, took him to Montreal, where he was introduced to medical research at Dr. Selye’s newly created Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the University of Montreal.

In his 1936 personal-development opus “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” Dale Carnegie quoted the Vienna-born scientist Hans Selye: “As much as we thirst for approval, we dread condemnation.”

Everything comes around; Dr Hans Selye looked into this many years ago.

Selye was a medical researcher in Montreal who studied hormonal changes in rats when, in the late 1930s, he realized that the rats he was studying were responding not merely to his injections of hormones and placebos, but also to the stress caused by the experiments.

Selye theorized that overexposing the body to stress would cause what he called “general adaptation syndrome,” which could lead to shock, alarm and eventually exhaustion.