“Cardiologists hated these guys,” Stanford neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky has said. Yet cardiologists in particular thought of their work as engineering-not psychiatry. Hans Selye began the investigations that earned him the moniker “the father of stress”: Selye stressed out rats with painful injections and extremely hot and cold temperatures, cut into the rats’ organs, and revealed the damage stress wrought on the body. But in the 1960s, their idea faced pushback.įriedman and Rosenman were not the first researchers to suggest that our thoughts and behavior can make us sick. Today, doctors and researchers describe Friedman and Rosenman as “pioneers” and “figures of major importance”. Two years later, at the urging of a public health director, they slimmed down their terminology from “overt behavior pattern A” and “overt behavior pattern B” to Type A and Type B.
In other words, the cardiologists argued that harried, goal-oriented people got heart attacks. Rosenman and Friedman defined this “overt behavior pattern A” as:ġ) an intense, sustained drive to achieve self-selected but usually poorly defined goalsĢ) profound inclination and eagerness to competeģ) persistent desire for recognition and advancementĤ) continuous involvement in multiple and diverse functions constantly subject to time restrictions (deadlines)ĥ) habitual propensity to accelerate the rate of execution of many physical and mental functionsĦ) extraordinary mental and physical alertness. The observation led to a paper, in 1959, that explored the association between a “specific overt behavior pattern” and coronary disease.
As they considered alternative explanations, the secretary pointed out that all their coronary patients were irritable men who fidgeted, checked their watch, and jumped out of their chairs to demand to know when their appointment would start. At the time, in the 1950s, the two cardiologists were conducting research that led them to doubt existing explanations for the buildup of cholesterol in heart attack and coronary disease patients. Ray Rosenman, who died in 2013, told the story of his and Dr. These patients, who were at risk for heart attacks, always sat in the hard chairs, and unlike the other patients, they arrived on time. The patients who had coronary heart disease, she told several of the doctors, never sat down on the waiting room’s sofas. Sixty years ago, a secretary in the office of a private medical practice in San Francisco made a fateful observation. The other reason is that the cardiologists and their peers had very generous patrons who funded their research and promoted their ideas: the executives of tobacco companies, who desperately wanted to pin the blame for the high rates of heart attack and cardiovascular disease among their customers on something other than smoking. So why did this medical term become a cultural mainstay? One reason is that the idea proved very influential-the two cardiologists wrote a bestselling book about Type A behavior and their work guided future medical research. Because while many people now use the term Type A as a badge of honor, the two men were cardiologists, and they invented the term Type A to describe stressed patients who were at a higher risk of heart attack, stroke, and other cardiovascular conditions. But they wanted to be Type B: easygoing, take every day as it comes type people. The two men who coined the term ‘Type A’ in the 1960s were also goal-oriented, high achieving types.
You know it, and you may even feel proud of that distinction.īut if you knew the origins of the term, you might feel differently about being Type A. You are-in other words-Type A: an ambitious, goal-oriented, and competitive person. You relish the stress of an impending deadline. You only enter competitions that you intend to win. You create to-do lists that end with “write a new to-do list.” You make a resolution every New Year, and you always succeed.
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