ABSTRACT
From the late nineteenth century till the 1930s, fatigue was a major topic of research especially in the field of Industrial and Applied Psychology, most of the literature appearing in journal paper form. This was partly because fatigue was an important factor in determining the workers’ efficiency and productivity. An additional factor, however, was the availability of new technologies such as the ‘kymograph’ and the ‘ergograph’ which enabled shifts in physical performance to be recorded as curves, using a smoked-paper covered cylinder. Obtaining a scientific picture of how and at what rate fatigue developed, and its relationship to other psychological factors, was in any case felt to be a basic task of psychophysics. This topic has never entirely vanished from Psychology, and clearly remains important in fields such as Sport Psychology, but its prominence as a research field declined after c.1930. Mosso (1906) was a very successful work from the heyday of fatigue studies. In more recent decades a somewhat different aspect of the topic came to general prominence, chronic fatigue syndrome. This is often reported by, or identified in, patients seeking medical treatment for some undefined malaise. It is generally considered psychosomatic, and signifying depression or some other psychopathological condition (see Shorter, 1993, Jason et al., 2003). See Rabinbach (1992) for a study of its broader historical significance.
