Stress (biology)
Etymology and historical usage

The term "stress" had none of its contemporary connotations before the 1920s. It is a form of the Middle English destresse, derived via Old French from the Latin stringere, "to draw tight". The word had long been in use in physics to refer to the internal distribution of a force exerted on a material body, resulting in strain. In the 1920s and '30s, biological and psychological circles occasionally used "stress" to refer to a physiological or environmental perturbation that could cause physiological and mental "strain". The amount of strain in reaction to stress depends on the resilience. Excessive strain would appear as illness.
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