The Age of Stress

Mark Jackson is Director of the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter. He has served as Chair of the Wellcome Trust History of Medicine Funding Committee, Chair of the Wellcome Trust Research Resources Funding Committee, and Senior Academic Adviser (Medical Humanities) to the Wellcome Trust. He was a member of the History Panel for REF 2014 and has taught modules in the history of medicine and science for thirty years. His books include New-born Child Murder (1996), The Borderland of Imbecility (2000), Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady (2006), Health and the Modern Home (ed., 2007), Asthma: The Biography (2009), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine (ed., 2011), The History of Medicine: A Beginner's Guide (2014), and The Routledge History of Disease (ed., 2016). He is currently writing a book on the history of the midlife crisis.

no-one tells the scientific story of stress better than Mark Jackson, one of the most influential historians of medicine in Anglo-American worlds ... Jackson shows that "stress" was a complex, flexible concept, which could be profoundly helpful in imposing some kind of stability and meaningfulness in an often chaotic world. As in Auden's dramatic poem, 'The Age of Anxiety', stress was a most useful analogy for the 20th century. Jackson's book promises to become a classic for anyone curious about how the language of stress became the lingua franca of our times

• Prologue: The Age of Stress 1: The Shock of Modernity 2: Adaptation and Disease 3: The Biochemistry of Life 4: The Cathedral of Stress 5: Coping with Stress 6: The Pursuit of Happiness Epilogue: The Search for Stability Bibliography Index