Excitement originates from the famous saying "Dose determines poison" of ParaCelsus in the16th century, that is, all substances are toxic, and only dose can distinguish poisons, which can be said to be the embryonic form of excitement. /kloc-Schulz, a microbiologist in the 9th century, observed the promoting effect of heavy metals and organic solvents on yeast growth, and thought that this phenomenon might be common in all kinds of chemicals and organisms, and then put forward arndt-Schulz's law, that is, weak stimulation accelerates vitality, moderate stimulation promotes vitality, and strong stimulation inhibits vitality, but strong stimulation can kill people. 1943, Southam and Ehrlich formally named the observed biphasic dose-effect relationship curve as "exciting effect" when studying the effect of red cedar extract on fungi, and used the word "exciting effect" for the first time to describe the beneficial effect of low concentration, which was published in the journal of Plant Pathology. This is the first time that the word hormesis appeared in academic journals. In 1980s, the US Environmental Protection Agency took the excitation effect into consideration when evaluating the carcinogenicity of chemicals, in order to answer the question "How to clean is clean". The upsurge of excitation effect began to recover, especially its impact on risk assessment was widely discussed. . Calabrese and Baldwin have done a lot of research on the excitatory effect, and published an article entitled "Toxicology Rethinks its Central Belief" in Nature in 2003. Since then, the study of excitability has become a hot spot in toxicology.

The word Hormesis comes from the Greek word "hormaein", which means "excited". In the past, the term "hormone deficiency" was also used, and oligo means at a low dose level. The dose-effect relationship is a biphasic curve of "low dose stimulation and high dose inhibition". At present, in toxicology reference books and professional magazines published in recent years in China, "excitation effect" is mostly translated into "toxic excitation effect", and some of them are translated into "chemical excitation effect" and "low dose promotion effect".