THE STRESS FACTORIES
Hans Selye, a Canadian born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, inaugurated in Montreal University mass slaughter of small animals, to announce a discovery which seemed of great importance to him and his associates; that animals answer in a constant, typical way to various types of brutal treatment.
It was to further this type of work that R.L.Noble and J.B.Collip of the same University built in 1942 the drum that is named for them, designed to slam the enclosed animals up and down, back and forth, against the iron bumps of the revolving device, which is being used to this day in physiological laboratories. After this treatment, the animals have scrambled intestines, crushed tissues, broken teeth and bones, ruptured livers and spleens, internal hemorrhages of the brain and stomach. So, 20 years after the introduction of this drum, one could read that at the Illinois College of Medicine, Chicago, hundreds of rats were rotated "....approximately 2,400 times" according to a report in Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Medicine and Biology, March 1962, pages 674 - 475.
To enable Hans Selye to compile his monumental, allegedly scientific volume entitled Stress (1950), not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of animals - mainly mice, rats, rabbits, cats - were submittted in countless laboratories to poisoning, burning, traumatic and electric shocks, various frustrations, crushings of bones and muscles, swimming to the point of exhaustion, exposure to freezing cold, screeching sirens, extirpation of various glands and organs, including the whole stomach and bowels (evisceration), often before they were spun in the Noble-Collip drum. And all this keeps being done today.
Selye coined the medical term internationally known as "stress," but he and his colleagues are to this day busy trying to explain what it means. Of his book, a leading article in the British Medical Journal (May 22, 1954, p. 1195) said with characteristic British understatement: "Some of Selye's ideas are hard to accept, and his terminology does not make the understanding of them easier. Other investigators have not always been able to reproduce his experimental findings, and the interpretation and significance of the results, particularly when applied to man, are not clear ...... It is doubtful whether the experimentally-induced lesions in rats previously conditioned by the removal of one kidney and fed on a high-salt diet, are the same as those occurring in the human connective tissues."
In 1956 Selye republished his volume renaming it The Stress of Life (McGraw-Hill, New York) cutting out various confusing parts - trying to make the rest clearer, but without much success, it seems to me. On page 46 he says that for scientific purposes, stress is defined as the state which manifests itself by the General Adaptation Syndrome (which is generally abbreviated as GAS). "The latter comprises: adrenal stimulation, shrinkage of lymphatic organs, gastrointestinal ulcers, alterations of the chemical composition of the body, and so forth. All these changes form a syndrome, a set of manifestations which appear together."
He gets more and more involved explaining what he means, and after spending much space enumerating everything that stress is not, he tries once more to define what stress is (p.54): "Stress is the state manifested by a specific syndrome which consists of all the nonspecifically induced changes within a biological system. Thus stress has its own characteristic form and composition but no particular cause."
My layman's comment to this last statement - Selye's book is in fact aimed at the layman - is that the stressed condition in millions of animals had a particular cause indeed: mainly Hans Selye, M.D., and the Collip-Noble drum.
In fact Hans Selye was extremely successful provoking ulcers in mice and rats. Naturally, those ulcers caused by rotating drums and electric shocks in animals, or other brutal interferences, have very little in common with the ulcers that man develops: first, because a man is not a mouse, and secondly because he has not been tortured as the mouse has been, so that his ulcers have an entirely different origin: and consequently neither a cure nor prevention can be found through this kind of research. But probably only people who have not been brainwashed in modern medical schools are able to grasp this simple truth.
Hans Selye goes a longer way than most other vivisectors trying to convince the layman that vivisectors are humanitarian. "I have never met a professional investigator," says he on page 69, "who was not concerned about the question of cruelty to animals and did not attempt to avoid it ... . Even if an experimental surgeon were a degenerate sadist he would have to anesthetize his animal for major surgery because delicate operations cannot be performed if the animal struggles." So what? It's when the animal wakes up from the anesthetic that his hell begins, and usually ends only with death, which usually takes much too much time in coming. And it isn't necessary to be a sadist to make others suffer - it is enough to be indifferent, unfeeling.
His efforts to minimize the horror of vivisection become even more evident on the following page: "In our institute last year, we used about 400 rats a week for research." Four hundred a week sounds considerably less than some 21,000 in a year, assuming his figures are accurate: And what about the thousands of other "institutes" that have been duplicating Selye's exercises since the early forties?
And then again (p.70) the anesthesia myth: "In a standard exiperiment a rat is anesthetized with ether, or some other anesthetic, until it is completely unconscious and unable to move or feel. Then the experimenter can expose a gland and remove it to learn how the rat will react to stress without this organ...." The truth of the matter is that right after one of these operations, while in the throes of postoperative effect, as soon as the animal is fully conscious it will he thrown into a tank or exposed to burns or freezing, etc. etc. to see how it reacts to Hans Selye's stress in its maimed condition...
In sum, Selye and Companions have allegedly identified a hormone excreted by the animals submitted to laboratory brutalities, and have reproduced it chemically. As a consequence, when a doctor diagnoses in a patient a "nervous stomach" or a "stresed condition" or "psychosomatic perturbations" (every smart doctor can make up his own definition) this patient runs the risk of being administered some synthetic hormone - ACTH, or some cortisone combinaton, or some other equally noxious chemical - the worst possible treatment, bound to aggravate through the addition of new poisons the patient's already impaired organic and psychic condition. (Cortisone has even created a new type of insanity: "Cortisone-induced madness.")
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On page 205 of his book, Selye in fact claims that "some of the resulting diseases of adaptation can be corrected . . . for instance, by the administration of hormones, the removal of endocrine glands, or by treatment with drugs which suppress endocrine or nervous activity."
But there are more and more doctors who claim that the remedies recommended by Selye are incomparably more damaging than the maladies they are supposed to cure. In fact, the advent of Selye does not seem to have clarified matters much. Says he on page 73: "In 1950, when I published Stress, the first technical treatise on this subject, I had to discuss more than 5,500 original articles and books which dealt with various related topics. Since that time, every year, my coworkers and I published a volume entitled Annual Report on Stress. In each of these books, we had to report on between 2,300 and 5,700 publications."
Questions anyone?
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P.S. For his divertissements on stress Hans Selye has reaped not less than 16 university degrees ad honorem, and some 50 different medals, prizes, awards, and honorary citizenships, while alone the U.S. National Institutes of Health grants (American taxpayers' money) to help finance his mass carnages between 1950 and 1963 amounted to at least $728,926.