Perhaps the most interesting point about this anecdote is that 
it appeals to a modern physicist. It would not have appealed to 
Newton or to Adam Smith, for they were great experts and 
advocates of the fragmentary and the specialist approaches. It 
is by means quite in accord with the outlook of the Chinese 
sage that Hans Selye works at his “stress” idea of illness. In the 
l920s he had been baffled at why physicians always seemed to 
concentrate on the recognition of individual diseases and 
specific remedies for such isolated causes, while never paying 
any attention to the “syndrome of just being sick.” Those who 
are concerned with the program “content” of media and not 
with the medium proper, appear to be in the position of 
physicians who ignore the “syndrome of just being sick.” Hans 
Selye, in tackling a total, inclusive approach to the field of 
sickness, began what Adolphe Jonas has continued in Irritation  
and Counter-Irritation ; namely, a quest for the response to