ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the ‘new etiology” of disease. The word “stress” has come to encompass the new etiology and to identify a universe of discourse that is a subset of pathology-the scientific discipline concerned with the parameters of cause and host response. The new dimension of pathology provides for a more complete understanding of the natural history of many diseases than has previously existed. The life chart invented by Adolf Meyer provided a format for demonstrating the relationship by organizing the data from the medical history as a biography. Studies of individual patients using the format revealed that many disorders occurred in a life situation that provoked conflict and a variety of emotions. Laboratory experiments on selected patients documented disease onset under these conditions. The development of the Social Readjustment Rating Scale was begun in 1949 with a systematic study of the life-event items observed empirically to occur in the setting in which disease developed.
