In the early 1970s Ann Wolbert Burgess (a psychiatric nurse) and Lynda Lytle Holmstrom (a sociologist) produced one of the most influential and controversial contributions to how clinicians, advocates, researchers and courts understand sexual assault: the articulation of Rape Trauma Syndrome (RTS). Their work — a series of empirical reports and books emerging from longitudinal study of rape victims treated at a Boston hospital — described a patterned cluster of emotional, cognitive, physical and behavioral reactions after sexual assault. RTS reshaped clinical practice (prompting crisis-intervention models), informed forensic nursing and courtroom testimony, and seeded later trauma research (including links to what we now conceptualize as PTSD). But it also provoked sustained critique for pathologising survivors and for methodological and legal problems that continue to matter. Below I summarize their work, highlight its most important findings, and offer a critical appraisal of its strengths, limits and enduring legacy.