The Secret History Behind The Science Of Stress

The modern idea of stress began on a rooftop in Canada, with a handful of rats freezing in the winter wind. This was 1936 and by that point the owner of the rats, an endocrinologist named Hans Selye, had become expert at making rats suffer for science.What was interesting to Selye was that no matter how different the tortures he devised for the rats were — from icy winds to painful injections — when he cut them open to examine their guts it appeared that the physical effects of his different tortures were always the same. And so the idea of stress — and it's potential costs to the body — was born.
But Selye wasn't the only high profile scientist who decided to promote the idea that stress posed a profound danger to health.
 In the mid-1950s two American cardiologists — Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman — created the idea of the Type A Personality. Their argument, essentially, was that there existed in America an entire class of people who lived lives so full of stress and pressure that their bodies were especially prone to disease, particularly heart attack. The doctors published a study that claimed the coronary disease rate for men with Type A personality was twice as high as other men.
 For the last decade or so, Petticrew and a group of colleagues in London have been searching through millions of documents from the tobacco industry that were archived online in the late '90s as part of a legal settlement with tobacco companies. What they've discovered is that both Selye's work and much of the work around Type A personality were profoundly influenced by cigarette manufacturers.