Stress Relief: The Origins of Stress Research by Art Martin
Hans Selye is considered the first researcher who was able to assign a meaning to a syndrome he discovered which was destroying productivity in business and was causing burnout in many people. Selye complained several times that if his knowledge of English had been more precise, he would have gone down in history as the father of the "strain" concept.

Although Selye was fluent in at least eight languages, including English, and could converse in another half dozen, his choice of "stress" to describe the non-specific response syndrome he discovered, was unfortunate. He had used "stress" in his initial letter to the Editor of Nature in 1936, who suggested that it be deleted since this implied nervous strain and substituted alarm reaction. He was also unaware that stress had been used for centuries in physics to explain elasticity, the property of a material that allows it to resume its original size and sh ... Read more »