The Age of Stress
Science and the Search for Stability
Mark Jackson
Reviews and Awards
"Mark Jackson's Age of Stress is an exemplary contribution to the historiography of modern psychology, psychiatry, disease and illness. International in scope, Jacksons study skilfully illuminates the development and evolution of a key medical concept that has increasingly defined and structured various aspects of modern human existence. Further to being a significant addition to the history of twentieth-century medicine, The Age of Stress will prove invaluable to social and economic historians of the modern period."--The British Journal for the History of Science
"Jackson argues that stress is the emblematic medical but also cultural condition, not just of our own age, but of modern times. In doing so, he juxtaposes a carefully told story of how medical science developed a theory of stress to make sense of keeping bodies and minds in healthy balance, with a story of how stress as a metaphor came to be deployed in popular culture and in thinking about political stability, economic security, and even the harmony of the cosmos....The Age of Stress may invite not just a series of more detailed case studies but also a study of even greater ambition. This is a mark of its considerable achievement."--Social History of Medicine
"[N]o-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 the '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."--Reviews in History
"This is a thoroughly-researched book and a lively story. It unfolds with the rigour of scholarly study but with much of the appeal of the popular histories cited [above], and the ubiquity of stress in the twenty-first century makes this both an important scholarly work as well as a pleasure to read for its very productive chapter 'Coping with Stress' as well as 'The Cathedral of Stress.'"--Years Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
