'The Stress of Life': Gender, Emotions and Health after the Second World War

In 1952, Hans Selye published a best-selling book on the relationship between stress and disease.  Based largely on the results of his own laboratory experiments on the role of pituitary and adreno-cortical hormones in the mediation of stress reactions, Selye’s account of biological stress was neither new nor universally accepted.  Nevertheless, The Stress of Life captured the imagination of post-war populations struggling to reconstruct families, communities and societies torn apart by the traumas of global conflict and threatened by the politics of the Cold War.

Funded by the Wellcome Trust, this international conference seeks to bring together historians of medicine with scholars of social, cultural, gender and economic history to analyse not only the manner in which links between emotions and health were formulated and substantiated during the post-war decades, but also how the stress of life was variably articulated and experienced in the aftermath of the war.