Hans Selye

János Hugo Bruno “Hans” Selye was a Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, on January 26, 1907. He grew up in Komárom, a Hungarian-majority town in present-day Slovakia that was divided by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. His father was a Hungarian doctor, and his mother was Austrian. Selye became a Doctor of Medicine and Chemistry in Prague in 1929, then built a scientific career in North America at Johns Hopkins University, McGill University, and the Université de Montréal.

Selye is best known for his work on the body’s non-specific response to stressors. As a medical student, he noticed that patients with different chronic illnesses, including tuberculosis and cancer, seemed to share a common set of symptoms. Later, while working with laboratory animals, he saw a similar pattern in rats exposed to cold, drugs, or surgical injury. These observations led him to describe what he first called the “general adaptation syndrome,” later known more simply as the “stress response.”

His model of general adaptation syndrome was triphasic: an initial alarm phase, followed by resistance or adaptation, and finally exhaustion and death. Selye argued that stress could be produced by positive or negative impulses, and he distinguished negative stress, “distress,” from positive stress, “eustress.” He also first described the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis system, by which the body copes with stress. Although he did not recognize every aspect of glucocorticoids, he understood their role in the stress response.

Selye’s thinking was shaped by close observation, by experiments that surprised him, and by earlier ideas in physiology. He acknowledged the influence of Claude Bernard’s idea of the milieu intérieur and Walter Cannon’s concept of homeostasis. One important clue came from an experiment in which he injected mice with extracts of various organs. At first he thought he had found a new hormone, but every irritating substance he injected produced the same symptoms: swelling of the adrenal cortex, atrophy of the thymus, and gastric and duodenal ulcers. That mistake helped point him toward a broader theory.

During the 1950s, as some experimental physiologists criticized his concepts as too vague and hard to measure, Selye promoted his ideas through popular books and lecture tours. His international bestseller The Stress of Life appeared in 1956, followed by From Dream to Discovery: On Being a Scientist in 1964 and Stress without Distress in 1974. His major academic book The Mast Cells, published in 1965, reviewed thousands of earlier publications. He worked as professor and director of the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the Université de Montréal, founded the International Institute of Stress in 1975, and helped start the Hans Selye Foundation in 1979.

Selye was nominated 17 times for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine between 1949 and 1953, though he never received it. He was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1968 and received honors from Concordia University and the American Academy of Achievement in 1976. He died in Montreal, Quebec, on October 16, 1982. His words still resonate because they make stress feel less mysterious and more workable: “Adopting the right attitude can convert a negative stress into a positive one.”