Concern that stress will cause you to lose hair has been around for a long time.

Just to amuse you I am sharing a dissertation that I came across in a book called The Art of Preserving the Hair written by Septimus Prowett, Old Bond Street, London in 1825.  Please avoid taking umbrage at some of the sentiments expressed as they are a feature of the time:

“Since the superabundance of lime in the body is one main cause of grey hair, as we have just seen, of which the reader may convince himself by observing the early grey hair of people who live in a limestone or chalk district, or where the water is peculiarly hard, so is the constriction of the pores of the skin one of the chief causes of baldness

What the surgeons call cutis anserlna, which means “goose skin”,  from its resembling the skin of a plucked goose, may be produced, as we have seen above, by cold, by grief, by fear, or by fever; and in this way the hairs may be partially strangled, preventing the rise of their colouring matter, and of course turning them grey; or they may be
cut off or snapt short on their exit from the skin, and the roots only left behind, but wholly confined and kept out of view below the skin, the consequence of which will be baldness.

As, from various causes, the skin strangles or destroys the hair, the remedies which can remove this state of the skin will be the most likely to succeed in effecting a cure.

We have just said that one of the chief causes of baldness is the contraction of the pores of the skin, which cuts off or snaps short the hairs at their exit, and leaves only the roots behind, but wholly confined and kept out of view below the skin.

It will also be necessary to remind you of the fact, that the hairs do not rise perpendicularly from their roots, but pass very obliquely, and at an acute angle, through the two outer coats of the skin, serving to bind these down to the inner coat, as if Nature had used the hairs for sewing thread, and hence the difficulty of pulling them out.

On these facts, taken in conjunction with the structure of the roots of the hair, we have already shewn how baldness may arise, from causes which produce an unnatural contraction of the skin; and we now take up the converse of the position.





People are often heard to complain of their hair—not falling off—but coming out in great quantities whenever it has been combed or brushed. By observing them narrowly or inquiring farther, it will be found that the complainants are of a weak or relaxed constitution, affected with indigestion, consumptive, nervous, or bilious; or that they have been weakened by intemperance or long illness.

It frequently, for example, occurs among women who have had a tedious confinement in child-bed, or to robust men who have been long confined with fractured bones or other injuries.

It is still more common in the weakness remaining the hairs owing their chief stability to this, it is not
wonderful that they should be loosened and come out.

From these plain principles, it will at once appear, that, as remedies for baldness or thin hair, arising from debility and relaxation, nothing can be more improper than the hair oil usually applied, as oil of any kind cannot fail to increase the relaxation of the skin.

We wonder, indeed, how the proprietors of the expensive nostrums, puffed off with this view, have so long been able to gull the public with so barefaced a hoax, as a few trials must demonstrate the truth of what we have now said.

If the patient, then, is prone to perspire, particularly on the head; if there be general weakness, indigestion, nervous or bilious ailments, or other symptoms of infirm health and shattered constitution, avoid, we advise you most earnestly, all oils and greasy applications, however much lauded and puffed by those who are interested in their sale.

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