Is Burnout the New Nostalgia?

Abstract

Is Burnout the New Nostalgia? Kim Adams (bio) Thomas Dodman. What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 304 pp. Paperback, $38.00. In January of 2020, I sent an email from the reading room of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. I had found an entry for "Nostalgia," between "Noli me tangere (see Lupus)" and "Obesity" in an 1834 Dictionary of Practical Medicine. Nostalgia, it appeared, was a dangerous disease in which "feelings, when inordinately exerted or long indulged" disordered the bodily functions "through the medium of the organic nervous system."1 While nostalgia might complicate existing conditions or produce dangerous sequalae like phthisis (tuberculosis) or marasmus (malnutrition), the acute form of the disease—"nostomania"—was deadly in its own right: a "more or less complete collapse of the functions of the brain and the powers of life may take place and the patient die in the course of a few weeks."2 My friend replied, "I'm in public stifling laughter at nostalgia being a fatal illness." Before the term became a ubiquitous signifier for wistful reminiscence, and the deadly force of such sentiments grew laughable, outbreaks of nostalgia decimated entire armies, according to Thomas Dodman. His recent book What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion is a careful, well-documented intervention in the history of medicine. Scholars of the long eighteenth century, particularly those with an interest in European medicine, will find a compelling case study of a forgotten disease. Dodman traces nostalgia's career from pathological affect to benign emotion through a history of the French armed forces, beginning under the absolutist Louis XIV and ending with the imperial Napoleon III. Nostalgia, it turns out, was a disease of national character. [End Page 167] Readers in the broader field of medical humanities will find a backstory for post-traumatic stress disorder and a historical counterpoint to our contemporary discourse of burnout. Dodman frames nostalgia as an earlier era's military mental health crisis: what PTSD was to American soldiers in the Vietnam War, nostalgia was to French soldiers in the Napoleonic era. Yet the etiology of the earlier disease preceded the psychology of trauma. Whereas modern military psychiatrists understood post-traumatic stress disorder to be caused by the shock of battle, eighteenth-century physicians defined nostalgia as a psychosomatic illness produced by the daily regimen of military life, in much the same way that burnout is a symptom of ordinary labor conditions under late capital. Dodman begins with the word itself—invented by a medical student at the University of Basel for his 1688 dissertatio medica—in the intellectual ferment of the European Enlightenment. Nostalgia, from the Greek words nostos for homecoming and algia for pain, was a scientific name for the vernacular Heimweh or maladie du pays: homesickness. It indexed a social and scientific problem. Nostalgia was a disease of mobility, of spatial displacement: "a motion sickness" in which the distance from home interfered with the ordinary circulation of bodily spirits, making them grow sluggish and potentially, perilously, cease (33). Dodman suggests a parallel between this new mechanistic "physiology of spirits" and the seasonal flows of migrant labor in "rural and protoindustrial" Europe (25, 34). The stagnant animal spirits of homesick peasant girls in Basel or Basque conscripts in Louis XIV's standing armies reflected how "increasingly far-flung and long-term migration flows were straining the networks of kinship and solidarity within which much of local and circular mobility had typically occurred up to that point" (34–35). Industrialization, militarization, and colonization changed the circulation of European bodies, which in turn changed the circulation within them. The new disease was less the malaise of wandering philosophers and more the effect of economic and political circumstances that uprooted artisans, peasants, and soldiers. Nostalgia was, from its inception, a soldier's disease. Strongly associated with Swiss militiamen, who succumbed when hired out to serve in royal armies across the continent, it became a major concern of the Service de santé des armées during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. At a time when the government was engaging every means at...