or even its fundamental truth. ³ This perspective on the body's description--
taking description as having a metaphorical character--liberates our view of
medical history. This historically informed view does not deny in the least
the experiential basis of the medical description of bodily ailments; for ex-
ample, of "overstrain of the heart." It lets us read the text as one which
simultaneously describes the ailment and the mentality of the community
describing the ailment. This approach to discourse is an attempt to practice
what William Blake called "double vision." ("May God us keep,/from single
vision and Newton's sleep.") It is an approach to discourse which avoids
several extreme, if heuristically useful, positions that resemble double vision
but fail to achieve a truly simultaneous study. I do not seek to dissolve stress
or its predecessors into the discourse that speaks it, for I am convinced that
the discourse says something. Nor do I seek to display a gradual unfolding
of the truth about an unchanging reality, for I do not think "stress" is an
eternal form, nor even a scientific concept that is being increasingly under-
stood year by year. For I find that the experiential basis shifts as does the
discourse. Both experience and discourse are mobile entities.

Although I name but one taproot in the complex net tying the present to
the past, it will suffice. I want to turn my attention to my contemporaries,
the community of friends that have helped my thinking and work mature by
their interest, criticism, and wisdom. I am indebted to M. Jeanne Peterson,
from whom I had the chance to learn a bit of the historian's craft during an
NEH Summer Seminar in 1987. I am indebted also to present and former
students and to friends, who have described faithfully their experiences of
stress and have struggled with me to understand the structure of those ex-
periences. Several people have carefully read the manuscript or big chunks
of it and have given me helpful insights: Bill Arney, Ivan Illich, Dave Lavery,
Jean Robert, Anson Rabinbach, and David Schwartz. I have followed their
suggestions to the best of my ability. I thank also my sister, Eileen McCluskey,
for editing the book manuscript with an eye for clarity and style--although
she bears no responsibility for the deficiencies that remain.

One group of friends in particular has inspired my thinking about stress.
It includes my colleague Bob Romanyshyn at the University of Dallas and
a group that has met yearly in wonderful places like Claremont, "Foster
Avenue" at Penn State, and the Institute for Traditional Acupuncture in
Columbia, Maryland. These friends include Ivan Illich, Barbara Duden, Jean
Robert, Dennis Slattery, Wolfgang Sachs, Bill Arney, and Dirk Boelticher.
There are many others, and I beg them to accept my apologies for not
mentioning them here. From these people I have learned much, but fur-
thermore I have come to place my efforts in terms of a larger intellectual
project which is fundamentally concerned with freeing people to subsist (to
use the scholastic term that Illich has rehabilitated) in our day. At (more or
less) yearly gatherings to discuss "the history of the human body," we have
examined epoch-specific forms of experiencing the lived body. But the raison

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